George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.Collection: Past
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.Collection: Inspirational
The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it againCollection: Doe
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.Collection: Intellectual
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.Collection: God
Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.Collection: Life
Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.Collection: Men
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.Collection: Confused
Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.Collection: Wise
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.Collection: Wisdom
It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.Collection: War
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.Collection: Thinking
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges themCollection: Philosophy
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.Collection: Ideas
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.Collection: Giving
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.Collection: Happiness
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.Collection: Science
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.Collection: Despair
The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.Collection: Fate
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.Collection: Dream
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.Collection: Fighting
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.Collection: Fate
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.Collection: Change
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.Collection: Mind
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.Collection: Travel
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.Collection: Nature
Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.Collection: Freedom
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.Collection: Children
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything elseCollection: Tunes
It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.Collection: Children
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.Collection: Knowledge
All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.Collection: Beauty