George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

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.

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.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

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 a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent …

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.