George Santayana
A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
The young man who has not wept is a savage,and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
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.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
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.
