George Santayana

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

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

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

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

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.

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.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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.

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

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

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.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.