That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.


George Santayana

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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crim...
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may ...
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with...
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live witho...
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death sup...
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The g...
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self...
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One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
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That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subj...
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Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
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The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old ag...
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In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflecti...
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It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of th...
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Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a v...
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If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
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Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone f...
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, an...
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There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made ...
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blo...
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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the bett...
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The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeab...
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under w...
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
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Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
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The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer...
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
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The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at s...
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The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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Habit is stronger than reason.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
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Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
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Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without bene...
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Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
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The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special se...
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sens...
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Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
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Depression is rage spread thin.
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to ...
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It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
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Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
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By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occu...
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Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happi...
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The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in t...
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
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The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience — the u...
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Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are frien...
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the f...
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To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, f...
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
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Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
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Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited
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One real world is enough.
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Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
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Progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness... Those who cannot remember the...
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The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little long...
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian...
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love wi...
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Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
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Sanity is a madness put to good use.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware...
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Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to it...
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Music is essentially useless, as life is.
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What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we th...
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should de...
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humo...
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The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
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Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes som...
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and...
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Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
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My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned ...
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Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects i...
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the anci...
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recog...
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Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
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Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
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Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, ...
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his ...
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Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his ...
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing t...
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the med...
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest i...
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Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
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The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who love it.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minute...
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious that that they are true.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.
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If one is the master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time insight i...
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
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Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judg...
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Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and ...
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
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Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament.
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there rem...
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing with...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imagin...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation sho...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Consciousness is a born hermit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
My atheism, like that of GEORGE SANTAYANA Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it mus...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To understand one's self is the classic form of consolation; to delude one's self is the romantic.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is no dunce like a mature dunce
GEORGE SANTAYANA