George Santayana

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.

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

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

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

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

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.

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

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

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

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.