George Santayana

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

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.

The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science

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.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

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

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

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

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

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

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

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

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

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