George Santayana

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

“To know your future you must know your past”

“It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur.”

“The wisest man has something yet to learn.”

“The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.”

“The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.”

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”

“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.”

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”

“All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.”

“The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.”

“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.”

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.”

“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”

“To knock a thing down when it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight of the blood.”

“I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.”

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”

“The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.”

“When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?”

“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”

“Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.”

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

“Memory... is an internal rumor.”

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”

“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”

“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.”

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”