George Santayana

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.