George Santayana

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.

By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human.

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours …

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.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter.

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

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

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.