George Santayana

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

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

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.

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

Skepticism like chastity should not be relinquished too readily.

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with, all else they ignore or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong or deny to be possible.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

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

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.

Oxford the paradise of dead philosophies.

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.

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.

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

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

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

The truth is cruel but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Habit is stronger than reason.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

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

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

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

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

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

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

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

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

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

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind but a sedentary city mind like that of the ancients.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

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

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

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

For a man who has done his natural duty death is as natural as sleep.

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

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Depression is rage spread thin.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

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.

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

Music is essentially useless as is life.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy easier in fact than to be a master in the truth because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

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

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