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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.

-George Santayana

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The Human Race, In

George Santayana

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

Prayer, Among Sane People, Has Never Superseded Practical Efforts To Secure The Desired End.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing Is So Irrevocable As Mind.

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.

Memory... Is An Internal Rumor.

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.

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

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.

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

Those Who Cannot Remember The Pastare Condemned To Repeat It. Or: Those Who Have Never Heard Of Good System Development Practice Are Condemned To Reinvent It.

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.

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

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

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

When Men And Women Agree, It Is Only In Their Conclusions; Their Reasons Are Always Different.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Culture Is On The Horns Of This Dilemma: If Profound And Noble It Must Remain Rare, If Common It Must Become Mean.

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

Work And Love These Are The Basics; Waking Life Is A Dream Controlled.

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.

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

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.

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

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

There Is No Right Government Except Good Government.

Since Barbarism Has Its Pleasures It Naturally Has Its Apologists.

Our Occasional Madness Is Less Wonderful Than Our Occasional Sanity.

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.

There Is No Cure For Birth And Death Save To Enjoy The Interval. The Dark Background Which Death Supplies Brings Out The Tender Colours Of Life In All Their Purity.

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

The Spirit's Foe In Man Has Not Been Simplicity, But Sophistication.

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

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

To Condemn Spontaneous And Delightful Occupations Because They Are Useless For Self-preservation Shows An Uncritical Prizing Of Life Irrespective Of Its Content.

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

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

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.

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.

Imagination Is Potentially Infinite. Though Actually We Are Limited To The Types Of Experience For Which We Possess Organs, Those Organs Are Somewhat Plastic. Opportunity Will Change Their Scope And Even Their Center.

Chaos Is Perhaps At The Bottom Of Everything.

The Quality Of Wit Inspires More Admiration Than Confidence

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.

To Be Brief Is Almost A Condition Of Being Inspired.

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

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.

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.

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.

Oaths Are The Fossils Of Piety.

Every Real Object Must Cease To Be What It Seemed, And None Could Ever Be What The Whole Soul Desired.

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

I Like To Walk About Among The Beautiful Things That Adorn The World; But Private Wealth I Should Decline, Or Any Sort Of Personal Possessions, Because They Would Take Away My Liberty.

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

Faith In The Supernatural Is A Desperate Wager Made By Man At The Lowest Ebb Of His Fortunes.

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.

There Is Nothing Impossible In The Existence Of The Supernatural: Its Existence Seems To Me Decidedly Probable.

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

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

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

Unmitigated Seriousness Is Always Out Of Place In Human Affairs.

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.

The Profoundest Affinities Are Those Most Readily Felt.

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

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

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.

To Substitute Judgments Of Fact For Judgments Of Value Is A Sign Of Pedantic And Borrowed Criticism.

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

It Takes Patience To Appreciate Domestic Bliss; Volatile Spirits Prefer Unhappiness.

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

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 Young Man Who Has Not Wept Is A Savage, And The Older Man Who Will Not Laugh Is A Fool.

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.

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.

The Lover Knows Much More About Absolute Good And Universal Beauty Than Any Logician Or Theologian, Unless The Latter, Too, Be Lovers In Disguise.

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?

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

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.

All The Doctrines That Have Flourished In The World About Immortality Have Hardly Affected Man's Natural Sentiment In The Face Of Death.

Sanctity And Genius Are As Rebellious As Vice.

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

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

Wisdom Comes By Disillusionment.

Words Of Wisdom

Disillusionment

Old Places And Old Persons In Their Turn, When Spirit Dwells In Them, Have An Intrinsic Vitality Of Which Youth Is Incapable, Precisely, The Balance And Wisdom That Come From Long Perspectives And Broad Foundations

There Is No Tyranny So Hateful As A Vulgar And Anonymous Tyranny. It Is All-permeating, All-thwarting; It Blasts Every Budding Novelty And Sprig Of Genius With Its Omnipresent And Fierce Stupidity. Such A Headless People Has The Mind Of A Worm And The Claws Of A Dragon.

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

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

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.

The Pride Of The Artisan In His Art And Its Uses Is Pride In Himself...it Is In His Skill And Ability To Make Things As He Wishes Them To Be That He Rejoices.

There Is No Dunce Like A Mature Dunce.

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

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

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

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

In The Contemplation Of Beauty We Are Raised Above Ourselves, The Passions Are Silenced And We Are Happy In The Recognition Of A Good That We Do Not Seek To Possess.

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

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

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

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

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

Beware Of Long Arguments And Long Beards.

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

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

A Conceived Thing Is Doubly A Product Of Mind, More A Product Of Mind, If You Will, Than An Idea, Since Ideas Arise, So To Speak,by The Mind's Inertia And Conceptions Of Things By Its Activity. Ideas Are Mental Sediment; Conceived Things Are Mental Growths.

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.

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

The Only Kind Of Reform Usually Possible Is Reform From Within; A More Intimate Study And More Intelligent Use Of The Traditional Forms.

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.

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.

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

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 Child Educated Only At School Is An Uneducated Child.

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

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

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.

Society Itself Is An Accident To The Spirit, And If Society In Any Of Its Forms Is To Be Justified Morally It Must Be Justified At The Bar Of The Individual Conscience.

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

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

Lost Friendship

Each Religion, So Dear To Those Whose Life It Sanctifies, And Fulfilling So Necessary A Function In The Society That Has Adopted It, Necessarily Contradicts Every Other Religion, And Probably Contradicts Itself.

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

. . . Until The Curtain Was Rung Down On The Last Act Of The Drama (and It Might Have No Last Act!) He Wished The Intellectual Cripples And The Moral Hunchbacks Not To Be Jeered At; Perhaps They Might Turn Out To Be The Heroes Of The Play.

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

Facts Are All Accidents. They All Might Have Been Different. They All May Become Different. They All May Collapse Altogether.

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.

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

Writing History

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.

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.

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?

Our Knowledge Is A Torch Of Smoky Pine That Lights The Pathway But One Step Ahead Across A Void Of Mystery And Dread.

Docility Is The Observable Half Of Reason.

The Loftiest Edifices Need The Deepest Foundations.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Almost Every Wise Saying Has An Opposite One, No Less Wise, To Balance It.

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.

The Combative Instinct Is A Savage Prompting By Which One Man's Good Is Found In Another's Evil.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Saints And Sinners

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.

Wisdom Comes From Disillusionment.

Disillusionment

It Is A Great Bond To Dislike The Same Things.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Universe, So Far As We Can Observe It, Is A Wonderful And Immense Engine; Its Extent, Its Order, Its Beauty, Its Cruelty, Makes It Alike Impressive.

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

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

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

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

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