George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

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 little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

Heaven is to be at peace with things.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.