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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.

-George Santayana

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There Is (as I

George Santayana

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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.

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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.

Man's Most Serious Activity Is Play.

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.

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?

Perhaps The Universe Is Nothing But An Equilibrium Of Idiocies.

In A Moving World Readaptation Is The Price Of Longevity.

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

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

. . . 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.

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

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.

That Life Is Worth Living Is The Most Necessary Of Assumptions, And Were It Not Assumed, The Most Impossible Of Conclusions.

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

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

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.

Do Not Have Evil-doers For Friends, Do Not Have Low People For Friends: Have Virtuous People For Friends, Have For Friends The Best Of Men.

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

Chaos Is Perhaps At The Bottom Of Everything.

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

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 Is Really So Poor And Melancholy As Art That Is Interested In Itself And Not In Its Subject.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In This World We Must Either Institute Conventional Forms Of Expression Or Else Pretend That We Have Nothing To Express; The Choice Lies Between A Mask And A Figleaf.

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

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

Religion Is The Natural Reaction Of The Imagination When Confronted By The Difficulties In A Truculent World.

Docility Is The Observable Half Of Reason.

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.

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.

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

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

All His Life He [the American] Jumps Into The Train After It Has Started And Jumps Out Before It Has Stopped; And He Never Once Gets Left Behind, Or Breaks A Leg.

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

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 Body Is An Instrument, The Mind Its Function, The Witness And Reward Of Its Operation.

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

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.

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

Beauty Is Objectified Pleasure.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Nothing You Can Lose By Dying Is Half As Precious As The Readiness To Die, Which Is Man's Charter Of Nobility.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Music Is Essentially Useless, As Is Life.

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

Depression Is Rage Spread Thin.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Intolerance Is A Form Of Egotism, And To Condemn Egotism Intolerantly Is To Share It.

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.

The Idea Of Christ Is Much Older Than Christianity.

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.

Even Under The Most Favorable Circumstances No Mortal Can Be Asked To Seize The Truth In Its Wholeness Or At Its Center.

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

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

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

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect...

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.

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

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

The Family Is One Of Nature's Masterpieces.

Unmitigated Seriousness Is Always Out Of Place In Human Affairs.

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

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

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?

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

Philosophy May Describe Unreasoning, As It May Describe Force; It Cannot Hope To Refute Them.

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.

Trust The Man Who Hesitates In His Speech And Is Quick And Steady In Action, But Beware Of Long Arguments And Long Beards.

There Is No Dunce Like A Mature Dunce.

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.

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.

The Unforgivable Sin Is The Refusal To Pardon.

Unforgivable Sin

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

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.

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of The War.

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

We Are Not Compelled In Naturalism, Or Even In Materialism, To Ignore Immaterial Things; The Point Is That Any Immaterial Things Which Are Recognized Shall Be Regarded As Names, Aspects, Functions, Or Concomitant Products Of Those Physical Things Among Which Action Goes On.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Making Sacrifices

Sacrifice For Others

It Is A Great Bond To Dislike The Same Things.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

History Is Nothing But Assisted And Recorded Memory.

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

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

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

Children Are Natural Mythologists: They Beg To Be Told Tales, And Love Not Only To Invent But To Enact Falsehoods.

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

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.

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

Memory... Is An Internal Rumor.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Religion In Its Humility Restores Man To His Only Dignity, The Courage To Live By Grace.

Men Become Superstitious, Not Because They Have Too Much Imagination, But Because They Are Not Aware That They Have Any.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

People Never Believe In Volcanoes Until The Lava Actually Overtakes Them.

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.

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

Man Is A Gregarious Animal, And Much More So In His Mind Than In His Body. He May Like To Go Alone For A Walk, But He Hates To Stand Alone In His Opinions.

If Clearness About Things Produces A Fundamental Despair, A Fundamental Despair In Turn Produces A Remarkable Clearness Or Even Playfulness About Ordinary Matters.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect, And It Is Shameful To Surrender It Too Soon Or To The First Comer; There Is Nobility In Preserving It Coolly And Proudly Through Long Youth, Until At Last, In The Ripeness Of Instinct And Discretion, It Can Be Safely Exchanged For Fidelity And Happiness.

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.

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

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

One Real World Is Enough.

Lovely Promise And Quick Ruin Are Seen Nowhere Better Than In Gothic Architecture.

Civilization Is Perhaps Approaching One Of Those Long Winters That Overtake It From Time To Time. Romantic Christendom - Picturesque, Passionate, Unhappy Episode - May Be Coming To An End. Such A Catastrophe Would Be No Reason For Despair.

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

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.

Habit Is Stronger Than Reason.

It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart.

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

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 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.

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.

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

The World Is So Ordered That We Must, In A Material Sense, Lose Everything We Have And Love, One Thing After Another, Until We Ourselves Close Our Eyes.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Real Unselfishness Consists In Sharing The Interests Of Others.

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

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

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

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.

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

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