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.
— George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
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.
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.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Depression is rage spread thin.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
