George Santayana

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

“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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

“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.”

“The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.”

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

“Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.”

“Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.”

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

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

“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.”

“Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.”

“Music is essentially useless, as is life.”

“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”

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

“By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.”

“To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.”

“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.”

“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”

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

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

“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.”

“It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”