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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.

-George Santayana

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We Must Welcome The

George Santayana

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

Real Unselfishness Consists In Sharing The Interests Of Others.

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.

Knowledge Of What Is Possible Is The Beginning Of Happiness.

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

Since Barbarism Has Its Pleasures It Naturally Has Its Apologists.

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

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

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.

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

For An Idea Ever To Be Fashionable Is Ominous, Since It Must Afterwards Be Always Old Fashioned

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

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

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

The Diseases Which Destroy A Man Are No Less Natural Than The Instincts Which Preserve Him.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

Memory... Is An Internal Rumor.

America Is A Young Country With An Old Mentality.

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

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

... 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.

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.

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

Chaos Is Perhaps At The Bottom Of Everything.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Real World Is Enough.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Ideal Society Is A Drama Enacted Exclusively In The Imagination.

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of The War.

The Unforgivable Sin Is The Refusal To Pardon.

Unforgivable Sin

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In A Moving World Readaptation Is The Price Of Longevity.

Habit Is Stronger Than Reason.

A Child Educated Only At School Is An Uneducated Child.

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

There Is No Right Government Except Good Government.

The Idea Of Christ Is Much Older Than Christianity.

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.

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

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.

A Simple Life Is Its Own Reward.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

Words Are Weapons, And It Is Dangerous . . . To Borrow Them From The Arsenal Of The Enemy.

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.

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

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

There Is No Dunce Like A Mature Dunce.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Our Occasional Madness Is Less Wonderful Than Our Occasional Sanity.

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.

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

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.

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

Intelligence Is Quickness In Seeing Things As They Are.

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.

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

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

Oxford, The Paradise Of Dead Philosophies.

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

Advertising Is The Modern Substitute For Argument, Its Function Is To Make The Worse Appear The Better Article. A Confused Competition Of All Propagandas -- Those Insults To Human Nature -- Is Carried On By The Most Expert Psychological Methods -- For Instance, By Always Repeating A Lie.

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect...

The Best Men In All Ages Keep Classic Traditions Alive

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Well-bred Instinct Meets Reason Halfway

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

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.

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

It Is Wisdom To Believe The Heart.

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

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

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

Many Possessions, If They Do Not Make A Man Better, Are At Least Expected To Make His Children Happier; And This Pathetic Hope Is Behind Many Exertions.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Bible Is Literature, Not Dogma.

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

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

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

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.

A Country Without A Memory Is A Country Of Madmen.

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

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

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

The Wisest Mind Has Something Yet To Learn.

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

Theory Helps Us To Bear Our Ignorance Of Facts.

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

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?

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

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.

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

The Irrational In The Human Has Something About It Altogether Repulsive And Terrible, As We See In The Maniac, The Miser, The Drunkard Or The Ape.

Music Is Essentially Useless, As Is Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt Only When It Breeds Inattention.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

To Be Brief Is Almost A Condition Of Being Inspired.

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.

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.

Depression Is Rage Spread Thin.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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