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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.

-George Santayana

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When A Man's Life

George Santayana

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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.

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

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

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.

A Simple Life Is Its Own Reward.

Man's Most Serious Activity Is Play.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of The War.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By "essence" I Understand A Universal, Of Any Degree Of Complexity And Definition, Which May Be Given Immediately, Whether To Sense Or To Thought.... This Object Of Pure Sense Or Pure Thought, With No Belief Superadded, An Object Inwardly Complete And Individual, But Without External Relations Or Physical Status, Is What I Call An Essence.

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

Fanaticism Consists Of Redoubling Your Effort When You Have Forgotten Your Aim.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Wisdom Comes From Disillusionment.

Disillusionment

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

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

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.

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.

Boston Was A Moral And Intellectual Nursery, Always Busy Applying First Principles To Trifles.

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

Never Build Your Emotional Life On The Weaknesses Of Others.

One Real World Is Enough.

Music Is Essentially Useless, As Is Life.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

Theory Helps Us To Bear Our Ignorance Of Facts.

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

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

Religions Are The Great Fairy Tales Of Conscience.

The Habit Of Looking For Beauty In Everything Makes Us Notice The Shortcomings Of Things, Our Sense, Hungry For Complete Satisfaction, Misses The Perfection It Demands.

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

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

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

The Quality Of Wit Inspires More Admiration Than Confidence

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.

Oxford, The Paradise Of Dead Philosophies.

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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.

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

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.

A Friend's Only Gift Is Himself.

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

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

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 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.

In A Moving World Readaptation Is The Price Of Longevity.

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.

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

Skepticism Is The Chastity Of The Intellect...

A Child Educated Only At School Is An Uneducated Child.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

. . . 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.

History Is Nothing But Assisted And Recorded Memory.

Our Occasional Madness Is Less Wonderful Than Our Occasional Sanity.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The Best Men In All Ages Keep Classic Traditions Alive

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

What Renders Man An Imaginative And Moral Being Is That In Society He Gives New Aims To His Life Which Could Not Have Existed In Solitude : The Aims Of Friendship , Religion , Science , And Art .

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

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

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.

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.

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

Art Supplies Constantly To Contemplation What Nature Seldom Affords In Concrete Experience - The Union Of Life And Peace.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

Columbus Gave The World Another World.

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

The Highest Form Of Vanity Is Love Of Fame.

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

Wisdom Comes By Disillusionment.

Words Of Wisdom

Disillusionment

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

The Profoundest Affinities Are Those Most Readily Felt.

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

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.

Is It Indeed From The Experience Of Beauty And Happiness, From The Occasional Harmony Between Our Nature And Our Environment, That We Draw Our Conception Of The Divine Life.

A Country Without A Memory Is A Country Of Madmen.

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

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.

Nothing Is So Irrevocable As Mind.

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

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.

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

Fashion Is Something Barbarous, For It Produces Innovation Without Reason And Imitation Without Benefit.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Truth Is A Jewel Which Should Not Be Painted Over; But It May Be Set To Advantage And Shown In A Good Light.

Art Is A Delayed Echo.

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.

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

Beware Of Long Arguments And Long Beards.

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

The Universe, As Far As We Can Observe It, Is A Wonderful And Immense Engine.... If We Dramatize Its Life And Conceive Its Spirit, We Are Filled With Wonder, Terror And Amusement, So Magnificent Is The Spirit.

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

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.

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

The Unforgivable Sin Is The Refusal To Pardon.

Unforgivable Sin

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

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

Sanity Is Madness Put To Good Use.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Periods Of Tranquillity Are Seldom Prolific Of Creative Achievement. Mankind Has To Be Stirred Up.

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.

Man Is Not Made To Understand Life, But To Live It.

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

Towers In A Modern Town Are A Frill And A Survival; They Seem Like The Raised Hands Of The Various Churches, Afraid Of Being Overlooked, And Saying To The Forgetful Public, Here I Am! Or Perhaps They Are Rival Lightning Rods, Saying To The Emanations Of Divine Grace, "please Strike Here!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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