George Santayana

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

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

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

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

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

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

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

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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

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.

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

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

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

America is a young country with an old mentality.

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

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.