George Santayana

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

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.

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

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

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

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

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

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 child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

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.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.