George Santayana
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.Collection: Real
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.Collection: Memories
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.Collection: Science
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.Collection: Experience
A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.Collection: Dream
I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.Collection: Real
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.Collection: Anxiety
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.Collection: Love
Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.Collection: Music
It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.Collection: Song
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.Collection: Peace
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.Collection: Effort
A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.Collection: Education
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .Collection: Art
The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.Collection: Truth
The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.Collection: Art
To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.Collection: Beautiful
An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.Collection: Real
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.Collection: Men
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.Collection: Retirement
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.Collection: World
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.Collection: Spiritual
Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.Collection: Order
Beauty is objectified pleasure.Collection: Beauty
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.Collection: War
There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.Collection: Mind
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.Collection: Art
Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.Collection: Atheism
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.Collection: Running
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.Collection: Christian
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.Collection: Death
Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.Collection: Integrity
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.Collection: Friendship
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidenceCollection: Confidence
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundationsCollection: Funny
Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.Collection: Religious
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.Collection: Love Life
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.Collection: Knowledge
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.Collection: Christian
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.Collection: Men
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.Collection: Life
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.Collection: Reality
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.Collection: Mean
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.Collection: Beauty
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.Collection: Mistake
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.Collection: Facts
It is a great bond to dislike the same things.Collection: Affinity
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.Collection: Time
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.Collection: Men