George Santayana

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

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.

George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

We 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.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.