01Undatedlove make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.George Santayana / quote ↗
03UndatedTo be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.George Santayana / quote ↗
04UndatedA string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.George Santayana / quote ↗
07UndatedWith 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.George Santayana / quote ↗
08UndatedThe muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.George Santayana / quote ↗
10UndatedWe 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.George Santayana / quote ↗
11UndatedEverything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.George Santayana / quote ↗
14UndatedThe more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.George Santayana / quote ↗
16UndatedThat life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.George Santayana / quote ↗
19UndatedThere is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.George Santayana / quote ↗
23UndatedThere is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.George Santayana / quote ↗
24UndatedFriends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.George Santayana / quote ↗
