George Santayana

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. ”

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

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape. ”

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

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

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. ”

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. ”

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany. ”

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. ”