George Santayana

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

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

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.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

To understand ones self is the classic form of consolation to delude ones self is the romantic.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

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

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Ones friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

Man's most serious activity is play.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

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

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

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Depression is rage spread thin.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Habit is stronger than reason.

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

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

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

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who werent there.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.

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 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 passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

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

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

The worship of power is an old religion.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

A mans feet should be planted in his country but his eyes should survey the world.

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

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

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humors.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.