George Santayana

“The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.”

“Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.”

“Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.”

“Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.”

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

“It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.”

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

“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”

“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”

“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.”

“It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.”

“Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”

“It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.”

“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”

“Sanity is madness put to good use.”

“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.”

“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.”

“Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.”

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