George Santayana

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.

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize …

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

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 …

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

The living have never shown me how to live.

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.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

I like to walk about amidst 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.

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem …

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his …

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

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.

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.