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It Is True That I Am Carrying Out Various Methods Of Treatment Recommended By Doctors And Dentists In The Hope Of Dying In The Remote Future In Perfect Health.

-George Santayana

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It Is True That

George Santayana

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It Is True That I Am Carrying Out Various Methods Of Treatment Recommended By Doctors And Dentists In The Hope Of Dying In The Remote Future In Perfect Health.

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To Attempt To Be Religious Without Practicing A Specific Religion Is As Possible As Attempting To Speak Without A Specific Language.

My Soul Hates The Fool Whose Only Passion Is To Live By Rule.

Man Is A Fighting Animal; His Thoughts Are His Banners, And It Is A Failure Of Nerve In Him If They Are Only Thoughts.

... So In Love The Heart Surrenders Itself Entirely To The One Being That Has Known How To Touch It. That Being Is Not Selected; It Is Recognised And Obeyed.

Prayer Is Not A Substitute For Work; It Is An Effort To Work Further And Be Efficient Beyond The Range Of One's Powers.

Existence Is A Miracle, And, Morally Considered, A Free Gift From Moment To Moment.

Society Is Like The Air, Necessary To Breathe But Insufficient To Live On.

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.

Bid, Then, The Tender Light Of Faith To Shine By Which Alone The Mortal Heart Is Led Unto The Thinking Of The Thought Divine.

Unmitigated Seriousness Is Always Out Of Place In Human Affairs.

The Highest Form Of Vanity Is Love Of Fame.

The Loftiest Edifices Need The Deepest Foundations.

Language Is Like Money, Without Which Specific Relative Values May Well Exist And Be Felt, But Cannot Be Reduced To A Common Denominator.

The Man Who Would Emancipate Art From Discipline And Reason Is Trying To Elude Rationality, Not Merely In Art, But In All Existence.

Never Build Your Emotional Life On The Weaknesses Of Others.

A Man Is Morally Free When, In Full Possession Of His Living Humanity, He Judges The World, And Judges Other Men, With Uncompromising Sincerity.

I Believe In The Possibility Of Happiness, If One Cultivates Intuition And Outlives The Grosser Passions, Including Optimism.

Half Our Standards Come From Our First Masters, And The Other Half From Our First Loves.

Parents Lend Children Their Experience And A Vicarious Memory; Children Endow Their Parents With A Vicarious Immortality.

Skepticism Is A Discipline Fit To Purify The Mind Of Prejudice And Render It All The More Apt, When The Time Comes, To Believe And To Act Wisely.

What Renders Man An Imaginative And Moral Being Is That In Society He Gives New Aims To His Life Which Could Not Have Existed In Solitude : The Aims Of Friendship , Religion , Science , And Art .

Love Make Us Poets, And The Approach Of Death Should Make Us Philosophers.

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.

Depression Is Rage Spread Thin.

To Knock A Thing Down, Especially If It Is Cocked At An Arrogant Angle, Is A Deep Delight Of The Blood.

Truth Is One Of The Realities Covered In The Eclectic Religion Of Our Fathers By The Idea Of God. Awe Very Properly Hangs About It, Since It Is The Immovable Standard And Silent Witness Of All Our Memories And Assertions; And The Past And The Future, Which In Our Anxious Life Are So Differently Interesting And So Differently Dark, Are One Seamless Garment For The Truth, Shining Like The Sun.

Tomes Of Aesthetic Criticism Hang On A Few Moments Of Real Delight And Intuition.

Our Dignity Is Not In What We Do, But What We Understand.

Experience Seems To Most Of Us To Lead To Conclusions, But Empiricism Has Sworn Never To Draw Them.

There Is No Greater Stupidity Or Meanness Than To Take Uniformity For An Ideal.

What Is More Important In Life Than Our Bodies Or In The World Than What We Look Like?

Chaos Is A Name For Any Order That Produces Confusion In Our Minds.

A Sanctity Hangs About The Sources Of Our Being, Whether Physical, Social, Or Imaginary.

It Is Easier To Make A Saint Out Of A Libertine Than Out Of A Prig.

Saints And Sinners

Science Is Nothing But Developed Perception, Interpreted Intent, Common Sense Rounded Out And Minutely Articulated.

Progress, Far From Consisting In Change, Depends On Retentiveness. When Change Is Absolute There Remains No Being To Improve And No Direction Is Set For Possible Improvement: And When Experience Is Not Retained, As Among Savages, Infancy Is Perpetual. Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It. In The First Stage Of Life The Mind Is Frivolous And Easily Distracted; It Misses Progress By Failing In Consecutiveness And Persistence. This Is The Condition Of Children And Barbarians, In Which Instinct Has Learned Nothing From Experience.

The Great Difficulty In Education Is To Get Experience Out Of Ideas.

The Superiority Of The Distant Over The Present Is Only Due To The Mass And Variety Of The Pleasures That Can Be Suggested, Compared With The Poverty Of Those That Can At Any Time Be Felt.

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

One Of The Peculiarities Of Recent Speculation, Especially In America, Is That Ideas Are Abandoned In Virtue Of A Mere Change Of Feeling, Without Any New Evidence Or New Arguments. We Do Not Nowadays Refute Our Predecessors, We Pleasantly Bid Them Good-bye.

By "essence" I Understand A Universal, Of Any Degree Of Complexity And Definition, Which May Be Given Immediately, Whether To Sense Or To Thought.... This Object Of Pure Sense Or Pure Thought, With No Belief Superadded, An Object Inwardly Complete And Individual, But Without External Relations Or Physical Status, Is What I Call An Essence.

Wisdom Lies In Taking Everything With Good Humor And A Grain Of Salt.

The Vital Straining Towards An Ideal, Definite But Latent, When It Dominates A Whole Life, May Express That Ideal More Fully Than Could The Best Chosen Words.

Knowledge Is Not Eating, And We Cannot Expect To Devour And Possess What We Mean. Knowledge Is Recognition Of Something Absent; It Is A Salutation, Not An Embrace.

The Idea Of Christ Is Much Older Than Christianity.

The Love Of All-inclusiveness Is As Dangerous In Philosophy As In Art.

Ideal Society Is A Drama Enacted Exclusively In The Imagination.

Friends Need Not Agree In Everything Or Go Always Together, Or Have No Comparable Other Friendships Of The Same Intimacy.

The World Is A Perpetual Caricature Of Itself; At Every Moment It Is The Mockery And The Contradiction Of What It Is Pretending To Be.

Our Character ... Is An Omen Of Our Destiny, And The More Integrity We Have And Keep, The Simpler And Nobler That Destiny Is Likely To Be.

Miracles Are Propitious Accidents, The Natural Causes Of Which Are Too Complicated To Be Readily Understood.

Nothing Is Really So Poor And Melancholy As Art That Is Interested In Itself And Not In Its Subject.

The Bible Is A Wonderful Source Of Inspiration For Those Who Don't Understand It.

People Are Usually More Firmly Convinced That Their Opinions Are Precious Than That They Are True.

The Existence Of Any Evil Anywhere At Any Time Absolutely Ruins A Total Optimism.

The Hunger For Facile Wisdom Is The Root Of All False Philosophy.

Nietzsche Said That The Earth Has Been A Madhouse Long Enough. Without Contradicting Him We Might Perhaps Soften The Expression, And Say That Philosophy Has Been Long Enough An Asylum For Enthusiasts.

There Is Nothing Sweeter Than To Be Sympathized With.

The Degree In Which A Poet's Imagination Dominates Reality Is, In The End, The Exact Measure Of His Importance And Dignity.

Memory Itself Is An Internal Rumour.

Most Men's Conscience, Habits, And Opinions Are Borrowed From Convention And Gather Continually Comforting Assurances From The Same Social Consensus That Originally Suggested Them.

When All Beliefs Are Challenged Together, The Just And Necessary Ones Have A Chance To Step Forward And Re-establish Themselves Alone.

The Quality Of Wit Inspires More Admiration Than Confidence

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.

Art Supplies Constantly To Contemplation What Nature Seldom Affords In Concrete Experience - The Union Of Life And Peace.

With You A Part Of Me Hath Passed Away; For In The Peopled Forest Of My Mind A Tree Made Leafless By This Wintry Wind Shall Never Don Again Its Green Array. Chapel And Fireside, Country Road And Bay, Have Something Of Their Friendliness Resigned; Another, If I Would, I Could Not Find, And I Am Grown Much Older In A Day. But Yet I Treasure In My Memory Your Gift Of Charity, And Young Hearts Ease, And The Dear Honour Of Your Amity; For These Once Mine, My Life Is Rich With These. And I Scarce Know Which Part May Greater Be,-- What I Keep Of You, Or You Rob From Me.

It Is Not Society's Fault That Most Men Seem To Miss Their Vocation. Most Men Have No Vocation.

My Atheism, Like That Of Spinoza, Is True Piety Towards The Universe And Denies Only Gods Fashioned By Men In Their Own Image, To Be Servants Of Their Human Interests.

The Dreamer Can Know No Truth, Not Even About His Dream, Except By Awaking Out Of It.

Well-bred Instinct Meets Reason Halfway

Thought Is Essentially Practical In The Sense That But For Thought No Motion Would Be An Action, No Change A Progress.

A Buoyant And Full-blooded Soul Has Quick Senses And Miscellaneous Sympathies: It Changes With The Changing World; And When Not Too Much Starved Or Thwarted By Circumstances, It Finds All Things Vivid And Comic. Life Is Free Play Fundamentally And Would Like To Be Free Play Altogether.

All Spiritual Interests Are Supported By Animal Life.

To Keep Beauty In Its Place Is To Make All Things Beautiful.

The Aim Of Education Is The Condition Of Suspended Judgment On Everything.

Man Is Not Made To Understand Life, But To Live It.

Religion Should Be Disentangled As Much As Possible From History And Authority And Metaphysics, And Made To Rest Honestly On One's Fine Feelings, On One's Indomitable Optimism And Trust In Life.

Government Is The Political Representative Of A Natural Equilibrium, Of Custom, Of Inertia; It Is By No Means A Representative Of Reason.

The Earth Has Music For Those Who Listen.

It Is Pathetic To Observe How Lowly The Motives Are That Religion, Even The Highest, Attributes To The Deity... To Be Given The Best Morsel, To Be Remembered, To Be Praised, To Be Obeyed Blindly And Punctiliously - These Have Been Thought Points Of Honor With The Gods.

The Arts Must Study Their Occasions; They Must Stand Modestly Aside Until They Can Slip In Fitly Into The Interstices Of Life.

Our Occasional Madness Is Less Wonderful Than Our Occasional Sanity.

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?

Music Is A Means Of Giving Form To Our Inner Feelings, Without Attaching Them To Events Or Objects In The World.

In Greece Wise Men Speak And Fools Decide.

It Is In Rare And Scattered Instants That Beauty Smiles Even On Her Adorers, Who Are Reduced For Habitual Comfort To Remembering Her Past Favours.

Advertising Is The Modern Substitute For Argument; Its Function Is To Make The Worse Appear The Better.

Happiness Is Impossible, And Even Inconceivable, To A Mind Without Scope And Without Pause, A Mind Driven By Craving, Pleasure, Or Fear. To Be Happy, You Must Be Reasonable, Or You Must Be Tamed. You Must Have Taken The Measure Of Your Powers, Tasted The Fruits Of Your Passion, And Learned Your Place In The World And What Things In It Can Really Serve You. To Be Happy, You Must Be Wise.

Reason In My Philosophy Is Only A Harmony Among Irrational Impulses.

The Line Between What Is Known Scientifically And What Has To Be Assumed In Order To Support Knowledge Is Impossible To Draw. Memory Itself Is An Internal Rumour.

If Artists And Poets Are Unhappy, It Is After All Because Happiness Does Not Interest Them.

There Is No Right Government Except Good Government.

Music Is Essentially Useless, As Life Is; But Both Have An Ideal Extension Which Lends Utility To Its Conditions.

The Muffled Syllables That Nature Speaks Fill Us With Deeper Longing For Her Word; She Hides A Meaning That The Spirit Seeks, She Makes A Sweeter Music Than Is Heard.

Men Almost Universally Have Acknowledged Providence, But That Fact Has Had No Force To Destroy Natural Aversions And Fears In The Presence Of Events.

All Language Is Rhetorical, And Even The Senses Are Poets.

Skepticism, Like Chastity, Should Not Be Relinquished Too Readily.

A Musical Education Is Necessary For Musical Judgement. What Most People Relish Is Hardly Music; It Is Rather A Drowsy Reverie Relieved By Nervous Thrills.

In The Concert Of Nature It Is Hard To Keep In Tune With Oneself If One Is Out Of Tune With Everything Else

Emotion Is Primarily About Nothing And Much Of It Remains About Nothing To The End.

A Soul Is But The Last Bubble Of A Long Fermentation In The World.

Experience Has Repeatedly Confirmed That Well-known Maxim Of Bacon's That 'a Little Philosophy Inclineth A Man's Mind To Atheism, But Depth In Philosophy Bringeth Men's Minds About To Religion.' At The Same Time, When Bacon Penned That Sage Epigram... He Forgot To Add That The God To Whom Depth In Philosophy Brings Back Men's Minds Is Far From Being The Same From Whom A Little Philosophy Estranges Them.

It Is A Revenge The Devil Sometimes Takes Upon The Virtuous, That He Entraps Them By The Force Of The Very Passion They Have Suppressed And Think Themselves Superior To.

A String Of Excited, Fugitive, Miscellaneous Pleasures Is Not Happiness; Happiness Resides In Imaginative Reflection And Judgment, When The Picture Of One's Life, Or Of Human Life, As It Truly Has Been Or Is, Satisfies The Will, And Is Gladly Accepted.

A Friend's Only Gift Is Himself.

The Tendency To Gather And To Breed Philosophers In Universities Does Not Belong To Ages Of Free And Humane Reflection: It Is Scholastic And Proper To The Middle Ages And To Germany.

Guard You Thoughts As You Would Your Wallet. Habit Is Stronger Than Reason.

To Delight In War Is A Merit In The Soldier, A Dangerous Quality In The Captain, And A Positive Crime In The Statesman.

Mortality Has Its Compensations; One Is That All Evils Are Transitory, Another That Better Times May Come.

Let A Man Once Overcome His Selfish Terror At His Own Finitude, And His Finitude Itself Is, In One Sense, Overcome.

Incapacity To Appreciate Certain Types Of Beauty May Be The Condition Sine Qua Non For The Appreciation Of Another Kind; The Greatest Capacity Both For Enjoyment And Creation Is Highly Specialized And Exclusive, And Hence The Greatest Ages Of Art Have Often Been Strangely Intolerant. The Invectives Of One School Against Another, Perverse As They Are Philosophically, Are Artistically Often Signs Of Health, Because They Indicate A Vital Appreciation Of Certain Kinds Of Beauty, A Love Of Them That Has Grown Into A Jealous Passion.

Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It.

Men Have Feverishly Conceived A Heaven Only To Find It Insipid, And A Hell To Find It Ridiculous.

All Living Souls Welcome Whatsoever They Are Ready To Cope With; All Else They Ignore, Or Pronounce To Be Monstrous And Wrong, Or Deny To Be Possible.

O World, Thou Choosest Not The Better Part! It Is Not Wisdom To Be Only Wise, And On The Inward Vision Close The Eyes, But It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart. Columbus Found A World, And Had No Chart, Save One That Faith Deciphered In The Skies; To Trust The Soul's Invincible Surmise Was All His Science And His Only Art.

Nothing So Much Enhances A Good As To Make Sacrifices For It.

Making Sacrifices

Sacrifice For Others

It Is Characteristic Of Spontaneous Friendship To Take On First, Without Enquiry And Almost At First Sight, The Unseen Doings And Unspoken Sentiments Of Our Friends; The Parts Known Give Us Evidence Enough That The Unknown Parts Cannot Be Much Amiss.

Nothing Can Be Lower Or More Wholly Instrumental Than The Substance And Cause Of All Things.

Does The Thoughtful Man Suppose That...the Present Experiment In Civilization Is The Last World We Will See?

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.

That Fear First Created The Gods Is Perhaps As True As Anything So Brief Could Be On So Great A Subject.

A Country Without A Memory Is A Country Of Madmen.

Nonsense Is So Good Only Because Common Sense Is So Limited.

There Is A Kind Of Courtesy In Skepticism. It Would Be An Offense Against Polite Conventions To Press Our Doubts Too Far.

Each Religion Necessarily Contradicts Every Other Religion, And Probably Contradicts Itself. Religions, Like Languages, Are Necessary Rivals. What Religion A Man Shall Have Is A Historical Accident, Quite As Much As What Language He Shall Speak.

Beauty As We Feel It Is Something Indescribable; What It Is Or What It Means Can Never Be Said.

The Works Of Nature First Acquire A Meaning In The Commentaries They Provoke.

Tyrants Are Seldom Free; The Cares And The Instruments Of Their Tyranny Enslave Them.

Chaos Is Perhaps At The Bottom Of Everything.

Nature Drives With A Loose Rein And Vitality Of Any Sort Can Blunder Through Many A Predicament In Which Reason Would Despair.

It Is A Great Advantage For A System Of Philosophy To Be Substantially True.

Character Is The Basis Of Happiness And Happiness The Sanction Of Character.

What Religion A Man Shall Have Is A Historical Accident, Quite As Much As What Language He Shall Speak.

If All Art Aspires To The Condition Of Music, All The Sciences Aspire To The Condition Of Mathematics.

America Is The Greatest Of Opportunities And The Worst Of Influences.

The Unforgivable Sin Is The Refusal To Pardon.

Unforgivable Sin

There Is No Dunce Like A Mature Dunce.

Spirituality Lies In Regarding Existence Merely As A Vehicle For Contemplation, And Contemplation Merely A Vehicle For Joy.

Eternal Vigilance Is The Price Of Knowledge.

Eternal Vigilance

Each Religion, By The Help Of More Or Less Myth, Which It Takes More Or Less Seriously, Proposes Some Method Of Fortifying The Human Soul And Enabling It To Make Its Peace With Its Destiny.

Fanaticism Consists Of Redoubling Your Effort When You Have Forgotten Your Aim.

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.

In Each Person I Catch The Fleeting Suggestion Of Something Beautiful And Swear Eternal Friendship With That.

Everything In Nature Is Lyrical In Its Ideal Essence, Tragic In Its Fate, And Comic In Its Existence.

Intelligence Is Quickness In Seeing Things As They Are.

Wisdom Comes From Disillusionment.

Disillusionment

The Profoundest Affinities Are Those Most Readily Felt, And Though A Thousand Later Considerations May Overlay And Override Them, They Remain A Background And Standard For All Happiness. If We Trace Them Out We Succeed.

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect, And It Is Shameful To Surrender It Too Soon Or To The First Comer.

Boston Was A Moral And Intellectual Nursery, Always Busy Applying First Principles To Trifles.

Music Contains A Whole Gamut Of Experience, From Sensuous Elements To Ultimate Intellectual Harmonies.

It Is Always Pleasant To Be Urged To Do Something On The Ground That One Can Do It Well.

There Is Nothing To Which Men, While They Have Food And Drink, Cannot Reconcile Themselves.

A Child Educated Only At School Is An Uneducated Child.

Wealth, Religion, Military Victory Have More Rhetorical Than Efficacious Worth.

The Passions Grafted On Wounded Pride Are The Most Inveterate; They Are Green And Vigorous In Old Age.

People Who Feel Themselves To Be Exiles In This World Are Mightily Inclined To Believe Themselves Citizens Of Another.

Religion Is Indeed A Convention Which A Man Must Be Bred In To Endure With Any Patience; And Yet Religion, For All Its Poetic Motley, Comes Closer Than Work-a-day Opinion To The Heart Of Things.

I Love Moving Water, I Love Ships, I Love The Sharp Definition, The Concentrated Humanity, The Sublime Solitude Of Life At Sea. The Dangers Of It Only Make Present To Us The Peril Inherent In All Existence, Which The Stupid, Ignorant, Un-travelled Land-worm Never Discovers; And The Art Of It, So Mathematical, So Exact, So Rewarding To Intelligence, Appeals To Courage And Clears The Mind Of Superstition, While Filling It With Humility And True Religion.

History Is Always Written Wrong, And So Always Needs To Be Rewritten.

Writing History

Beauty Is Objectified Pleasure.

Christianity Persecuted, Tortured, And Burned. Like A Hound It Tracked The Very Scent Of Heresy. It Kindled Wars, And Nursed Furious Hatreds And Ambitions. It Sanctified, Quite Like Mohammedism, Extermination And Tyranny. All This Would Have Been Impossible If, Like Buddhism, It Had Looked Only For Peace And The Liberation Of Souls. It Looked Beyond; It Dreamt Of Infinite Blisses And Crowns It Should Be Crowned With Before An Electrified Universe And An Applauding God... Buddhism Had Tried To Quiet A Sick World With Anesthetics; Christianity Sought To Purge It With Fire.

In Endowing Us With Memory, Nature Has Revealed To Us A Truth Utterly Unimaginable To The Unreflective Creation, The Truth Of Immortality....the Most Ideal Human Passion Is Love, Which Is Also The Most Absolute And Animal And One Of The Most Ephemeral.

We Do Right Enough Darling, If We Go Wrong Together.

The Soul, Too Has Her Virginity And Must Bleed A Little Before Bearing Fruit.

Gnomic Wisdom, However, Is Notoriously Polychrome, And Proverbs Depend For Their Truth Entirely On The Occasion They Are Applied To. Almost Every Wise Saying Has An Opposite One, No Less Wise, To Balance It.

Habit Is Stronger Than Reason.

Nothing Can Be Meaner Than The Anxiety To Live On, To Live On Anyhow And In Any Shape; A Spirit With Any Honor Is Not Willing To Live Except In Its Own Way, And A Spirit With Any Wisdom Is Not Over-eager To Live At All.

I Like To Walk About Amidst The Beautiful Things That Adorn The World.

Man Has An Inexhuastible Faculty For Lying, Especially To Himself.

There Must ... Be In Our Very Nature A Very Radical And Widespread Tendency To Observe Beauty, And To Value It. No Account Of The Principles Of The Mind Can Be At All Adequate That Passes Over So Conspicuous A Faculty.

Theory Helps Us To Bear Our Ignorance Of Facts.

The One Who Does Not Remember History Is Bound To Live Through It Again

Religious Doctrines Would Do Well To Withdraw Their Pretension To Be Dealing With Matters Of Fact. That Pretension Is Not Only The Source Of The Conflicts Of Religion With Science And The Vain And Bitter Controversies Of Sects; It Is Also The Cause Of The Impurity And Incoherence Of Religion In The Soul.

American Life Is A Powerful Solvent. It Seems To Neutralize Every Intellectual Element, However Tough And Alien It May Be, And To Fuse It In The Native Good Will, Complacency, Thoughtlessness, And Optimism.

Before He Sets Out, The Traveler Must Possess Fixed Interests And Facilities To Be Served By Travel.

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.

To Fight Is A Radical Instinct; If Men Have Nothing Else To Fight Over They Will Fight Over Words, Fancies, Or Women, Or They Will Fight Because They Dislike Each Other's Looks, Or Because They Have Met Walking In Opposite Directions.

The Whole Machinery Of Our Intelligence, Our General Ideas And Laws, Fixed And External Objects, Principles, Persons, And Gods, Are So Many Symbolic, Algebraic Expressions. They Stand For Experience; Experience Which We Are Incapable Of Retaining And Surveying In Its Multitudinous Immediacy. We Should Flounder Hopelessly, Like The Animals, Did We Not Keep Ourselves Afloat And Direct Our Course By These Intellectual Devices. Theory Helps Us To Bear Our Ignorance Of Fact.

Photography At First Was Asked To Do Nothing But Embalm Our Best Smiles For The Benefit Of Our Friends And Our Best Clothes For The Amusement Of Posterity. Neither Thing Lasts, And Photography Came As A Welcome Salve To Keep Those Precious, If Slightly Ridiculous, Things A Little Longer In The World.

Philosophy Is A More Intense Sort Of Experience Than Common Life Is, Just As Pure And Subtle Music, Heard In Retirement, Is Something Keener And More Intense Than The Howling Of Storms Or The Rumble Of Cities.

The Family Is One Of Nature's Masterpieces.

A Way Foolishness Has Of Revenging Itself Is To Excommunicate The World.

I Leave You But The Sound Of Many A Word In Mocking Echoes Haply Overheard, I Sang To Heaven. My Exile Made Me Free, From World To World, From All Worlds Carried Me.

Experience Is A Mere Whiff Or Rumble, Produced By Enormously Complex And Ill-deciphered Causes Of Experience; And In The Other Direction, Experience Is A Mere Peephole Through Which Glimpses Come Down To Us Of Eternal Things.

Men Have Always Been The Victims Of Trifles, But When They Were Uncomfortable And Passionate, And In Constant Danger, They Hardly Had Time To Notice What The Daily Texture Of Their Thoughts Was In Their Calm Intervals, Whereas With Us The Intervals Are All.

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.

Time Is Like An Enterprising Manager Always Bent On Staging Some New And Surprising Production, Without Knowing Very Well What It Will Be.

Knowledge Of What Is Possible Is The Beginning Of Happiness.

There Are Books In Which The Footnotes, Or The Comments Scrawled By Some Reader's Hand In The Margin, Are More Interesting Than The Text. The World Is One Of Those Books.

Any Attempt To Speak Without Speaking Any Particular Language Is Not More Hopeless Than The Attempt To Have A Religion That Shall Be No Religion In Particular.... Every Living And Healthy Religion Has A Marked Idiosyncrasy. Its Power Consists In Its Special And Surprising Message And The Bias Which That Revelation Gives To Life.

The Best Men In All Ages Keep Classic Traditions Alive

For A Man Who Has Done His Natural Duty, Death Is As Natural As Sleep.

The Bible Is Literature, Not Dogma.

The Strongest Feelings Assigned To The Conscience Are Not Moral Feelings At All; They Express Merely Physical Antipathies.

Never Have I Enjoyed Youth So Thoroughly As I Have In My Old Age. In Writing Dialogues In Limbo, The Last Puritan, And Now All These Descriptions Of The Friends Of My Youth And The Young Friends Of My Middle Age, I Have Drunk The Pleasure Of Life More Pure, More Joyful Than It Ever Was When Mingled With All The Hidden Anxieties And Little Annoyances Of Actual Living. 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.

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 Theatre, For All Its Artifices, Depicts Life In A Sense More Truly Than History, Because The Medium Has A Kindred Movement To That Of Real Life, Though An Artificial Setting And Form.

Wisdom Comes By Disillusionment.

Words Of Wisdom

Disillusionment

The Human Race, In Its Intellectual Life, Is Organized Like The Bees: The Masculine Soul Is A Worker, Sexually Atrophied, And Essentially Dedicated To Impersonal And Universal Arts; The Feminine Is Queen, Infinite Fertile, Omnipresent In Its Brooding Industry, But Passive And Abounding In Intuitions Without Method And Passions Without Justice.

Beautiful Things, When Taste Is Formed, Are Obviously And Unaccountably Beautiful.

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