Quotes from George Santayana

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

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

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.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

There 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.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.

Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of ones life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.