George Santayana

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Habit is stronger than reason.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.