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It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart.

-George Santayana

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It Is Wisdom To

George Santayana

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It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart.

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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.

The Family Is One Of Nature's Masterpieces.

It Would Hardly Be Possible To Exaggerate Man's Wretchedness If It Were Not So Easy To Overestimate His Sensibility

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

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

Unmitigated Seriousness Is Always Out Of Place In Human Affairs.

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.

Life Is Judged With All The Blindness Of Life Itself.

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.

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.

Religion Is The Love Of Life In The Consciousness Of Impotence.

He Thinks He Believes Only What He Sees, But He Is Much Better At Believing Than At Seeing.

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.

You Cannot Prove Realism To A Complete Sceptic Or Idealist; But You Can Show An Honest Man That He Is Not A Complete Sceptic Or Idealist, But A Realist At Heart. So Long As He Is Alive His Sincere Philosophy Must Fulfil The Assumptions Of His Life And Not Destroy Him.

The Difficult Is That Which Can Be Done Immediately; The Impossible That Which Takes A Little Longer.

Beauty Is A Pledge Of The Possible Conformity Between The Soul And Nature, And Consequently A Ground Of Faith In The Supremacy Of The Good.

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

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.

The Philosophy Of The Common Man Is An Old Wife That Gives Him No Pleasure, Yet He Cannot Live Without Her, And Resents Any Aspersions That Strangers May Cast On Her Character.

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

Poetry Is An Attenuation, A Rehandling, An Echo Of Crude Experience; It Is Itself A Theoretic Vision Of Things At Arm's Length.

...science Is Nothing But Developed Perception, Interpreted Intent, Common-sense Rounded Out And Minutely Articulated. It Is Therefore As Much An Instinctive Product, As Much A Stepping Forth Of Human Courage In The Dark, As Is Any Inevitable Dream Or Impulsive Action.

The Same Battle In The Clouds Will Be Known To The Deaf Only As Lightning And To The Blind Only As Thunder.

There Are Three Traps That Strangle Philosophy: The Church, The Marriage Bed, And The Professor's Chair.

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

A Man's Memory May Almost Become The Art Of Continually Varying And Misrepresenting His Past, According To His Interest In The Present.

It Is Rash To Intrude Upon The Piety Of Others: Both The Depth And The Grace Of It Elude The Stranger.

Graphic Design Is The Paradise Of Individuality, Eccentricity, Heresy, Abnormality, Hobbies And Humors.

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

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

Popular Poets Are The Parish Priests Of The Muse, Retailing Her Ancient Divinations To A Long Since Converted Public.

Manhood And Sagacity Ripen Of Themselves; It Suffices Not To Repress Or Distort Them.

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.

It Is Possible To Be A Master In False Philosophy, Easier, In Fact, Than To Be A Master In The Truth, Because A False Philosophy Can Be Made As Simple And Consistent As One Pleases.

Man Alone Knows That He Must Die; But That Very Knowledge Raises Him, In A Sense, Above Mortality, By Making Him A Sharer In The Vision Of Eternal Truth. He Becomes The Spectator Of His Own Tragedy; He Sympathizes So Much With The Fury Of The Storm That He Has No Ears Left For The Shipwrecked Sailor, Though The Sailor Were His Own Soul. The Truth Is Cruel, But It Can Be Loved, And It Makes Free Those Who Have Loved It.

The Pint Would Call The Quart A Dualist, If You Tried To Pour The Quart Into Him.

Never Build Your Emotional Life On The Weaknesses Of Others.

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.

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 .

The More Rational An Institution Is The Less It Suffers By Making Concessions To Others.

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

Plasticity Loves New Moulds Because It Can Fill Them, But For A Man Of Sluggish Mind And Bad Manners There Is Decidedly No Place Like Home.

All Beauties Are To Be Honored, But Only One Embraced.

The Fates, Like An Absent-minded Printer, Seldom Allow A Single Line To Stand Perfect And Unmarred.

The Wonder Of An Artist's Performance Grows With The Range Of His Penetration, With The Instinctive Sympathy That Makes Him, In His Mortal Isolation, Considerate Of Other Men's Fate And A Great Diviner Of Their Secret, So That His Work Speaks To Them Kindly, With A Deeper Assurance Than They Could Have Spoken With To Themselves.

We Should Have To Abandon Our Vested Illusions, Our Irrational Religions And Patriotisms.

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.

A Body Seriously Out Of Equilibrium, Either With Itself Or With Its Environment, Perishes Outright. Not So A Mind. Madness And Suffering Can Set Themselves No Limit.

The Theater, For All Its Artifices, Depicts Life In A Sense More Truly Than History.

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

Beware Of Long Arguments And Long Beards.

A Great Man Need Not Be Virtuous, Nor His Opinions Right, But He Must Have A Firm Mind, A Distinctive Luminous Character.

The Fact Of Having Been Born Is A Bad Augury For Immortality.

I Feel So Much The Continual Death Of Everything And Everybody, And Have So Learned To Reconcile Myself To It, That The Final And Official End Loses Most Of Its Impressiveness.

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

To Be An American Is Of Itself Almost A Moral Condition, An Education, And A Career.

Well-bred Instinct Meets Reason Halfway

In The Gospels, For Instance, We Sometimes Find The Kingdom Of Heaven Illustrated By Principles Drawn From Observation Of This World Rather Than From An Ideal Conception Of Justice; ... They Remind Us That The God We Are Seeking Is Present And Active, That He Is The Living God; They Are Doubtless Necessary If We Are To Keep Religion From Passing Into A Mere Idealism And God Into The Vanishing Point Of Our Thought And Endeavour.

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

At Best, The True Philosopher Can Fulfil His Mission Very Imperfectly, Which Is To Pilot Himself, Or At Most A Few Voluntary Companions Who May Find Themselves In The Same Boat.

Reason And Happiness Are Like Other Flowers; They Wither When Plucked.

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.

It Is War That Wastes A Nations Wealth, Chokes Its Industries, Kills Its Flower, Narrows Its Sympathies, Condemns It To Be Governed By Adventurers, And Leaves The Puny, Deformed, And Unmanly To Breed The Next Generation.

Columbus Found A World, And Had No Chart Save One That Faith Deciphered In The Skies.

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.

Before You Contradict An Old Man, My Fair Friend, You Should Endeavour To Understand Him.

Nothing Is So Irrevocable As Mind.

The Best Men In All Ages Keep Classic Traditions Alive

Even The Most Inspired Verse, Which Boasts Not Without A Relative Justification To Be Immortal, Becomes In The Course Of Ages A Scarcely Legible Hieroglyphic; The Language It Was Written In Dies, A Learned Education And An Imaginative Effort Are Requisite To Catch Even A Vestige Of Its Original Force. Nothing Is So Irrevocable As Mind.

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

The Tide Of Evolution Carries Everything Before It, Thoughts No Less Than Bodies, And Persons No Less Than Nations.

If A Man Really Knew Himself He Would Utterly Despise The Ignorant Notions Others Might Form On A Subject In Which He Had Such Matchless Opportunities For Observation.

A Dream Is Always Simmering Below The Conventional Surface Of Speech And Reflection.

It Is Right To Prefer Our Own Country To All Others, Because We Are Children And Citizens Before We Can Be Travellers Or Philosophers.

The God To Whom Depth In Philosophy Bring Back Men's Minds Is Far From Being The Same From Whom A Little Philosophy Estranges Them

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

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.

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.

Profound Skepticism Is Favorable To Conventions, Because It Doubts That The Criticism Of Conventions Is Any Truer Than They Are.

Oaths Are The Fossils Of Piety.

To Reform Means To Shatter One Form And To Create Another; But The Two Sides Of This Act Are Not Always Equally Intended Nor Equally Successful.

Art Is A Delayed Echo.

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

It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart.

There Is No Dunce Like A Mature Dunce.

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

Nietzsche Was Personally More Philosophical Than His Philosophy. His Talk About Power, Harshness, And Superb Immorality Was The Hobby Of A Harmless Young Scholar And Constitutional Invalid.

Philosophers Are Very Severe Towards Other Philosophers Because They Expect Too Much.

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.

... Even If Lucretius Was Wrong, And The Soul Is Immortal, It Is Nevertheless Steadily Changing Its Interests And Its Possessions.our Lives Are Mortal If Our Soul Is Not; And The Sentiment Which Reconciled Lucretius To Death Is As Much Needed If We Are To Face Many Deaths, As If We Are To Face Only One.

Self-assurance Is Contemptible And Fatal Unless It Is Self-knowledge.

Every Nation Thinks Its Own Madness Normal And Requisite; More Passion And More Fancy It Calls Folly, Less It Calls Imbecility.

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.

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.

A Man's Feet Should Be Planted In His Country, But His Eyes Should Survey The World.

History Is A Pack Of Lies About Events That Never Happened Told By People Who Weren't There.

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

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

The Need Of Exercise Is A Modern Superstition, Invented By People Who Ate Too Much And Had Nothing To Think About.

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

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

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.

For Gold Is Tried In The Fire And Acceptable Men In The Furnace Of Adversity.

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

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.

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.

By Nature's Kindly Disposition Most Questions Which It Is Beyond A Man's Power To Answer Do Not Occur To Him At All.

Questions And Answers

It Is A Great Bond To Dislike The Same Things.

The World Is Not Respectable; It Is Mortal, Tormented, Confused, Deluded Forever; But It Is Shot Through With Beauty, With Love, With Glints Of Courage And Laughter; And In These, The Spirit Blooms Timidly, And Struggles To The Light Amid The Thorns.

In Greece Wise Men Speak And Fools Decide.

An Artist Is A Dreamer Consenting To Dream Of The Actual World.

The Human Mind Is Not Rich Enough To Drive Many Horses Abreast And Wants One General Scheme, Under Which It Strives To Bring Everything.

Eloquence Is A Republican Art, As Conversation Is An Aristocratic One.

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.

It Is The Acme Of Life To Understand Life.

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

The Truth Properly Means The Sum Of All True Propositions, What Omniscience Would Assert, The Whole Ideal System Of Qualities Andrelations Which The World Has Exemplified Or Will Exemplify. The Truth Is All Things Seen Under The Form Of Eternity.

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.

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.

For Shakespeare, In The Matter Of Religion, The Choice Lay Between Christianity And Nothing. He Chose Nothing.

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

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

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.

I Have Imagination, And Nothing That Is Real Is Alien To Me.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps The Only True Dignity Of Man Is His Capacity To Despise Himself.

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.

Docility Is The Observable Half Of Reason.

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

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

To Call War The Soil Of Courage And Virtue Is Like Calling Debauchery The Soil Of Love.

To Be Boosted By An Illusion Is Not To Live Better Than To Live In Harmony With The Truth ... These Refusals To Part With A Decayed Illusion Are Really An Infection To The Mind.

Sanctity And Genius Are As Rebellious As Vice.

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.

To Drink In The Spirit Of A Place You Should Be Not Only Alone But Unhurried.

Friendship Is Almost Always The Union Of A Part Of One Mind With The Part Of Another; People Are Friends In Spots.

What Brings Enlightenment Is Experience, In The Sad Sense Of This Word--the Pressure Of Hard Facts And Unintelligible Troubles, Making A Man Rub His Eyes In His Waking Dream, And Put Two And Two Together. Enlightenment Is Cold Water.

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

It Is Veneer, Rouge, Aestheticism, Art Museums, New Theaters, Etc. That Make America Impotent. The Good Things Are Football, Kindness, And Jazz Bands.

One Real World Is Enough.

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

In Unphilosophical Minds Any Rare Or Unexpected Thing Excites Wonder, While In Philosophical Minds The Familiar Excites Wonder Also.

Philosophers Are As Jealous As Women; Each Wants A Monopoly Of Praise.

To Be Interested In The Changing Seasons Is A Happier State Of Mind Than To Be Hopelessly In Love With Spring.

The Truth Is Cruel, But It Can Be Loved, And It Makes Free Those Who Have Loved It.

To Me, It Seems A Dreadful Indignity To Have A Soul Controlled By Geography.

Not To Believe In Love Is A Great Sign Of Dullness. There Are Some People So Indirect And Lumbering That They Think All Real Affection Rests On Circumstantial Evidence.

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

Fun Is A Good Thing But Only When It Spoils Nothing Better.

There Is No Right Government Except Good Government.

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

The Earth Has Music For Those Who Listen.

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.

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?

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

Sometimes We Have To Change The Truth In Order To Remember It.

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.

Art Is The Response To The Demand For Entertainment, For The Stimulation Of Our Senses And Imagination, And Truth Enters Into It Only As It Subserves These Ends.

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.

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

Writing History

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

Saints Cannot Arise Where There Have Been No Warriors, Nor Philosophers Where A Prying Beast Does Not Remain Hidden In The Depths.

Injustice In This World Is Not Something Comparative; The Wrong Is Deep, Clear, And Absolute In Each Private Fate.

America Is A Young Country With An Old Mentality.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt Only When It Breeds Inattention.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Love, Whether Sexual, Parental, Or Fraternal, Is Essentially Sacrificial, And Prompts A Man To Give His Life For His Friends.

I Believe In General In A Dualism Between Facts And The Ideas Of Those Facts In Human Heads.

The Family Is An Early Expedient And In Many Ways Irrational. If The Race Had Developed A Special Sexless Class To Be Nurses, Pedagogues, And Slaves, Like The Workers Among Ants And Bees, Then The Family Would Have Been Unnecessary. Such A Division Of Labor Would Doubtless Have Involved Evils Of Its Own, But It Would Have Obviated Some Drags And Vexations Proper To The Family.

Historical Investigation Has For Its Aim To Fix The Order And Character Of Events Throughout Past Time And In All Places. The Task Is Frankly Superhuman.

Old Age Is As Forgetful As Youth, And More Incorrigible; It Displays The Same Inattentiveness To Conditions; Its Memory Becomes Self-repeating And Degenerates Into An Instinctive Reaction, Like A Bird's Chirp.

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

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.

My Remembrance Of The Past Is A Novel I Am Constantly Recomposing; And It Would Not Be A Historical Novel, But Sheer Fiction, If The Material Events Which Mark And Ballast My Career Had Not Their Public Dates And Characters Scientifically Discoverable.

Historical Novels

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

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

To Be Happy You Must Have Taken The Measure Of Your Powers, Tasted The Fruits Of Your Passion, And Learned Your Place In The World.

A Child Educated Only At School Is An Uneducated Child.

The Wisest Mind Has Something Yet To Learn.

The Loftiest Edifices Need The Deepest Foundations.

Order, For A Liberal, Means Only Peace; And The Hope Of A Profound Peace Was One Of The Chief Motives In The Liberal Movement. Concessions And Tolerance And Equality Would Thus Have Really Led To Peace, And To Peace Of The Most Radical Kind, The Peace Of Moral Extinction.

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

Tolerated People Are Never Conciliated. They Live On, But The Aroma Of Their Life Is Lost.

An Ideal Cannot Wait For Its Realization To Prove Its Validity.

A Conception Not Reducible To The Small Change Of Daily Experience Is Like A Currency Not Exchangeable For Articles Of Consumption; It Is Not A Symbol, But A Fraud.

It Would Repel Me Less To Be A Hangman Than A Soldier, Because The One Is Obliged To Put To Death Only Criminals Sentenced By The Law, But The Other Kills Honest Men Who Like Himself Bathe In Innocent Blood At The Bidding Of Some Superior.

Oxford, The Paradise Of Dead Philosophies.

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.

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

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

The Living Have Never Shown Me How To Live.

What Is False In The Science Of Facts May Be True In The Science Of Values.

An Operation That Eventually Kills May Be Technically Successful, And The Man May Die Cured; And So A Description Of Religion Thatshowed It To Be Madness Might First Show How Real And Warm It Was, So That If It Perished, At Least It Would Perish Understood.

The Mind Of The Renaissance Was Not A Pilgrim Mind, But A Sedentary City Mind, Like That Of The Ancients.

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.

An Artist May Visit A Museum But Only A Pedant Can Live There.

It Is A Pleasant Surprise To Him (the Pure Mathematician) And An Added Problem If He Finds That The Arts Can Use His Calculations, Or That The Senses Can Verify Them, Much As If A Composer Found That Sailors Could Heave Better When Singing His Songs.

If Pain Could Have Cured Us We Should Long Ago Have Been Saved.

Proofs Are The Last Thing Looked For By A Truly Religious Mind Which Feels The Imaginary Fitness Of Its Faith.

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