Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
— George Santayana
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
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.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
A 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.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
