George Santayana

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

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.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

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

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

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.