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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.

-George Santayana

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Order, For A Liberal,

George Santayana

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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.

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There Is A Prodigious Selfishness In Dreams: They Live Perfectly Deaf And Invulnerable Amid The Cries Of The Real World.

Man's Most Serious Activity Is Play.

Logic, Like Language, Is Partly A Free Construction And Partly A Means Of Symbolizing And Harnessing In Expression The Existing Diversities Of Things; And Whilst Some Languages, Given A Man's Constitution And Habits, May Seem More Beautiful And Convenient To Him Than Others, It Is A Foolish Heat In A Patriot To Insist That Only His Native Language Is Intelligible Or Right.

The Soul Is The Voice Of The Body's Interests.

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.

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.

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.

Though The Heart Wear The Garment Of Its Sorrow And Be Not Happy Like A Naked Star, Yet From The Thought Of Peace Some Peace We Borrow, Some Rapture From The Rapture Felt Afar.

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.

Music Is Essentially Useless, As Is Life.

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

Life Is Not A Spectacle Or A Feast; It Is A Predicament.

The Sophisticated Concern About Art Sinks Before A Spontaneous Love Of Reality, And I Thank The Photograph For Being So Transparent A Vehicle For Things.

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.

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

The Traveller Must Be Somebody And Come From Somewhere, So That His Definite Character And Moral Traditions May Supply An Organ And A Point Of Comparison For His Observations.

When A Man's Life Is Over, It Remains True That He Was One Sort Of Man And Not Another. A Man Who Understands Himself Under The Form Of Eternity Knows The Quality That Eternally Belongs To Him, And Knows That He Cannot Wholly Die, Even If He Would, For When The Movement Of His Life Is Over, The Truth Of His Life Remains.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

...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 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

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.

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.

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

To Turn Events Into Ideas Is The Function Of Literature.

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect...

The Working Of Great Institutions Is Mainly The Result Of A Vast Mass Of Routine, Petty Malice, Self Interest, Carelessness And Sheer Mistake. Only A Residual Fraction Is Thought.

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

Making Sacrifices

Sacrifice For Others

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.

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

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

A Grateful Environment Is A Substitute For Happiness. It Can Quicken Us From Without As A Fixed Hope And Affection, Or As The Consciousness Of A Right Life, Can Quicken Us From Within.

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.

To Feel Beauty Is A Better Thing Than To Understand How We Come To Feel It. To Have Imagination And Taste, To Love The Best, To Be Carried By The Contemplation Of Nature To A Vivid Faith In The Ideal, All This Is More, A Great Deal More, Than Any Science Can Hope To Be.

Professional Philosophers Are Usually Only Apologists: That Is, They Are Absorbed In Defending Some Vested Illusion Or Some Eloquent Idea. Like Lawyers Or Detectives, They Study The Case For Which They Are Retained.

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

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

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

With An Artist No Sane Man Quarrels, Any More Than With The Colour Of A Child's Eyes.

The True Christian Is In All Countries A Pilgrim And A Stranger.

It Takes A Wonderful Brain And Exquisite Senses To Produce A Few Stupid Ideas.

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

To Know What People Really Think, Pay Regard To What They Do, Rather Than What They Say.

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.

Knowledge Of What Is Possible Is The Beginning Of Happiness.

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

In Any Close Society It Is More Urgent To Restrain Others Than To Be Free Oneself. Hence The Tendency For The Central Authority To Absorb And Supersede Such As Are Local Or Delegated.

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

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.

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.

We Must Welcome The Future, Remembering That Soon It Will Be The Past; And We Must Respect The Past, Remembering That It Was Once All That Was Humanly Possible.

Real Unselfishness Consists In Sharing The Interests Of Others.

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.

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.

The Mediocrity Of Everything In The Great World Of Today Is Simply Appalling. We Live In Intellectual Slums.

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

Religions Are The Great Fairy Tales Of Conscience.

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

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.

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of The War.

Nature In Denying Us Perennial Youth Has At Least Invited Us To Become Unselfish And Noble.

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

... 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.

As Widowers Proverbially Marry Again, So A Man With The Habit Of Friendship Always Finds New Friends.

Lost Friendship

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.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt Only When It Breeds Inattention.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

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.

Happiness Is The Only Sanction Of Life; Where Happiness Fails, Existence Remains A Mad And Lamentable Experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Nothing Can Be Meaner Than The Anxiety To Live On, To Live On Anyhow And In Any Shape.

History Is Always Written Wrong, And So Always Needs To Be Rewritten. ...what Is Interesting Is Brought Forward As If It Had Been Central And Efficacious In The March Of Events, And Harmonies Are Turned Into Causes. Kings And Generals Are Endowed With Motives Appropriate To What The Historian Values In Their Actions; Plans Are Imputed To Them Prophetic Of Their Actual Achievements, While The Thoughts That Really Preoccupied Them Remain Buried In Absolute Oblivion.

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

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 Crave Support In Vanity, As We Do In Religion, And Never Forgive Contradictions In That Sphere.

Better Not Be A Hero Than Work Oneself Up Into Heroism By Shouting Lies.

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.

The Loneliest Woman In The World Is A Woman Without A Close Woman Friend.

Nature Is Like A Beautiful Woman That May Be As Delightfully And As Truly Known At A Certain Distance As Upon A Closer View; As To Knowing Her Through And Through; That Is Nonsense In Both Cases, And Might Not Reward Our Pains.

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

To Understand Oneself Is The Classic Form Of Consolation; To Elude Oneself Is The Romantic.

The Word Experience Is Like A Shrapnel Shell, And Bursts Into A Thousand Meanings.

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

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.

One Real World Is Enough.

One's Friends Are That Part Of The Human Race With Which One Can Be Human.

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.

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

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?

History Is Nothing But Assisted And Recorded Memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Bible Is Literature, Not Dogma.

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

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

The Family Is One Of Nature's Masterpieces.

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.

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

Never Have I Enjoyed Youth So Thoroughly As I Have In My Old Age

A Fanatical Imagination Cannot Regard God As Just Unless He Is Represented As Infinitely Cruel.

Uselessness Is A Fatal Accusation To Bring Against Any Act Which Is Done For Its Presumed Utility, But Those Which Are Done For Their Own Sake Are Their Own Justification.

There Is No Cure For Birth And Death Save To Enjoy The Interval.

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.

Man Is As Full Of Potential As He Is Of Importance.

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.

Never Build Your Emotional Life On The Weaknesses Of Others.

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

Matters Of Religion Should Never Be Matters Of Controversy. We Neither Argue With A Lover About His Taste, Nor Condemn Him, If We Are Just, For Knowing So Human A Passion.

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

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.

Those Who Speak Most Of Progress Measure It By Quantity And Not By Quality.

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.

Nothing Is So Irrevocable As Mind.

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

Life Is Judged With All The Blindness Of Life Itself.

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.

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.

The Quality Of Wit Inspires More Admiration Than Confidence

In A Moving World Readaptation Is The Price Of Longevity.

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.

It Is One Thing To Lack A Heart And Another To Possess Eyes And A Just Imagination.

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.

Art Like Life, Should Be Free, Since Both Are Experimental.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Loftiest Edifices Need The Deepest Foundations.

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

To Be Bewitched Is Not To Be Saved, Though All The Magicians And Aesthetes In The World Should Pronounce It To Be So.

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

The Effort Of Art Is To Keep What Is Interesting In Existence, To Recreate It In The Eternal.

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

Fear First Created The Gods.

It Is The Acme Of Life To Understand Life.

Oaths Are The Fossils Of Piety.

In Greece Wise Men Speak And Fools Decide.

Heaven Is To Be At Peace With Things.

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

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.

It Is A Great Bond To Dislike The Same Things.

It Is A New Road To Happiness, If You Have Strength Enough To Castigate A Little The Various Impulses That Sway You In Turn.

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

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.

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.

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

A Simple Life Is Its Own Reward.

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.

What Better Comfort Have We, Or What Other Profit In Living Than To Feed, Sobered By The Truth Of Nature, Awhile Upon Her Beauty, And Hand Her Torch Of Gladness To The Ages Following After?

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

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.

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

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.

Animals Are Born And Bred In Litters. Solitude Grows Blessed And Peaceful Only In Old Age.

Ideal Society Is A Drama Enacted Exclusively In The Imagination.

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

Progress, Far From Consisting In Change, Depends On Retentiveness. Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It.

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

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

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

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

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

There Is (as I Now Find) No Remorse For Time Long Past, Even For What May Have Mortified Us Or Made Us Ashamed Of Ourselves When It Was Happening: There Is A Pleasant Panoramic Sense Of What It All Was And How It All Had To Be. Why, If We Are Not Vain Or Snobbish, Need We Desire That It Should Have Been Different? The Better Things We Missed May Yet Be Enjoyed Or Attained By Someone Else Somewhere: Why Isn't That Just As Good? And There Is No Regret, Either, In The Sense Of Wishing The Past To Return, Or Missing It: It Is Quite Real Enough As It Is, There At Its Own Date And Place.

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

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

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

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.

Spirit Itself Is Not Human; It May Spring Up In Any Life... It May Exist In All Animals, And Who Know In How Many Undreamt-of Beings, Or In The Midst Of What Worlds?

There Is Nothing Sweeter Than To Be Sympathized With.

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.

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

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.

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

I Have No Axe To Grind; Only My Thoughts To Burnish.

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

Sanity Is Madness Put To Good Use.

The Brute Necessity Of Believing Something So Long As Life Lasts Does Not Justify Any Belief In Particular.

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 Fly That Prefers Sweetness To A Long Life May Drown In Honey.

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