George Santayana

“ Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing; only a word for something negative and merely notional—the fact that each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to value it truly. ”

“ In the flight of larks, however, by a rare favour of fortune, all seems to be spontaneity, courage, and trust, even within this material sphere; nothing seems to be adjustment or observation. Their life in the air is a sort of intoxication of innocence and happiness in the blind pulses of existence. They are voices of the morning, young hearts seeking experience and not remembering it; when they seem to sob they are only catching their breath. They spring from the ground as impetuously as a rocket or the jet of a fountain, that bursts into a shower of sparks or of dew-drops ”

“ I wonder what they think Tipperary means—for this is a mystical song. Probably they are willing to leave it vague, as they do their notions of honour or happiness or heaven. Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would come; they are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened. ”

“ Their stories cause the merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the fancy, without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our interest from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In every English-speaking home, in the four quarters of the globe, parents and children will do well to read Dickens aloud of a winter's evening; they will love winter, and one another, and God the better for it. What a wreath that will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to hang to this poet's memory—the very crown he would have chosen! ”

“ Intelligence is the flower of war and the flower of love. Both, in the end, are comprehension. How miraculously in our happy moments we understand, how far we jump, what masses of facts we dominate at a glance! There is no labour then, no friction or groping, no anxious jostling against what we do not know, but only joy in this intricate outspread humorous world, intoxication as ethereal as the lark's, but more descriptive. If his song is raised above the world for a moment by its wantonness and idle rapture, ours is raised above it essentially by its scope. To look before and after is human ”

“ Their smile, their voice, and the joy they bring us are the only life they have. They are fertile only like the clouds, in that by dissolving they give place to some other form, no less lovely and elusive than themselves; and perhaps if we took a long view we should not feel that our own passage through existence had a very different quality. We last as a strain of music lasts, and we go where it goes. Is it not enough that matter should illustrate each ideal possibility only once and for a moment, and that Caesar or Shakespeare should figure once in this world? ”

“ His festivals are heavy with pathos; they mark the events on which his existence turns—harvests, funerals, redemptions, wooings, and wars. When he disregards all these tiresome things, he becomes a fop or a fanatic. There is no worthy transport for him except sane philosophy—a commentary, not a dream. His intelligence is most intense and triumphant when there is least waste in his life; for if hard thinking sometimes makes the head ache, it is because it comes hard, not because it is thinking; our fuddled brain grates and repeats itself in that it can't think. ”

“ They knew that the confused battles of earth must be fought over some nominal prize; men and animals will always be fighting for something, not because the thing is necessarily of any value to them, but because they wish to snatch it from one another. Helen had lent her name and image to colour an ancient feud, and make articulate the dull eternal contention between Asia and Europe. It was for existence that each party was fighting; but it added to their courage and self-esteem to say they were fighting for beauty, and that the victory of their side would be a victory for the gods. ”

“ All the Englishman's attitudes and habits—his out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business—when they are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself. Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. ”

“ His wings are his intelligence; not that they bring ultimate success to his animal will, which must end in failure, but that they lift his failure itself into an atmosphere of laughter and light, where is his proper happiness. He cannot take his fine flight, like the lark, in the morning, in mad youth, in some irresponsible burst of vitality, because life is impatient to begin: that sort of thing is the fluttering of a caged bird, a rebellion against circumstance and against commonness which is a sign of spirit, but not spirit in its self-possession, not happiness nor a school of happiness. ”

“ The foot of the cross—I dare not say the cross itself—is a good station from which to survey existence. In the greatest griefs there is a tragic calm; the fury of the will is exhausted, and our thoughts rise to another level; as the shrill delights and the black sorrows of childhood are impossible in old age. People sometimes make crosses of flowers or of gold; and I like to see the enamelled crucifix richly surrounded with scrolls, and encrusted with jewels; without a touch of this pagan instinct the religion of the cross would not be healthy nor just. ”

“ We too exist; and existence is a joy to the sportive side of our nature, itself akin to a shower of sparks and a patter of irrevocable adventures. What indeed could be more exhilarating than such a rout, if only we are not too exacting, and do not demand of it irrelevant perfections? The art of life is to keep step with the celestial orchestra that beats the measure of our career, and gives the cue for our exits and our entrances. Why should we willingly miss anything, or precipitate anything, or be angry with folly, or in despair at any misadventure? ”

“ While still alive and subject, like all existing things, to the undermining flux of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul into an idea, and more in pride than in sorrow he has offered up his life on the altar of the Muses. Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old dimensions and its old pace. Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become "persons" or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble. ”

“ That a different life will supersede mine is nothing against my happiness; that time is swallowing me up is nothing against my appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the miser stringing his pearls and never looking at them, counting the drops that trickle into his cup and never emptying it, never feeling the intoxication of living now, of telling the truth frankly, and of being happy here I If the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other free spirit, so long as I live, or after I am dead. ”

“ The love of friends in youth, in the cases where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical tendency. In character, though seldom in intensity, it resembles the dart which, in an ecstatic vision, pierced the heart of Saint Theresa, bursting the normal integument by which the blood is kept coursing through generation after generation, in the closed channel of human existence and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round; it is, in one sense, wasted and sterilized; but in being diverted from its earthly labours it suffuses the whole universe with light ”

“ Queen Mab is a naughty sprite, full of idle curiosity and impartial laughter. When she flutters over the roofs of cities, she is no angel with a mission, coming to sow there some chosen passion or purpose of her own; nor does she gather from those snoring mortals any collective sentiment or aspiration, such as a classic muse might render articulate, or such as religion or war or some consecrated school of art might embody. She steals wilily like a stray moonbeam into every crack and dark old corner of the earth. Her deft touch, as she pretends, sets all men dreaming, each after his own heart ”

“ The poet does not evolve into the general, nor vice versa; nor does a man, in growing further, become a woman, superior as she may be in her own way. That is why snobbery is really a vice: it tempts us to neglect and despise our proper virtues in aping those of other people. If an angel appeared to me displaying his iridescent wings and treble voice and heart fluttering with eternal love, I should say, "Certainly, I congratulate you, but I do not wish to resemble you." Snobbery haunts those who are not reconciled with themselves; evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot be everything. ”

“ The truth is, she lives only for him; she really has no children, only young sisters who are also more or less in love with him and he with them; and she sleeps her whole life long in his absence. In all those strange doings and wanderings reported of her she is only walking in her sleep. The approach of Hermes awakes her and lends her life—the only life she has. Her true name is Illusion; and it is very characteristic of him, so rich in pity, merriment, and shrewdness, to have chosen this poor child, Illusion, for his love. ”

“ Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity; and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is a long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one. What, on the contrary, could be more splendidly sincere than the impulse to play in real life, to rise on the rising wave of every feeling and let it burst, if it will, into the foam of exaggeration? ”

“ We should have to make peace with the fact of war. It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world. Free life has the spirit of comedy. It rejoices in the seasonable beauty of each new thing, and laughs at its decay, covets no possessions, demands no agreement, and strives to sustain nothing in being except a gallant spirit of courage and truth, as each fresh adventure may renew it. ”

“ No sooner is the fair phantom called into existence than she has already leapt, as if carried by destiny, into her lover's arms; for nothing can be more longed for, or more rapturously beautiful when it appears, than perfect evidence is to the mind. And the womb of nature, too, in its dark fertility, must be relieved to bring something to light at last. Yet this rare concourse of desires, and this blissful marriage, proves in the end most unhappy, for there is sin in it. ”

“ Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake, in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind are reflected upside down; and a certain tremor and intensity is added to them in that narrower frame, which they would hardly have in the upper air. This system renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical, and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace; the forms which things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their substance ”

“ If you renounce the flesh you must renounce the world; things called indecent or obscene are inextricably woven into the texture of human existence; there can be no completely honest comedy without them. Life itself would have to be condemned as sinful; we should deny that anything harmonious, merry, or sweet could be made of it, either in the world or on the stage. If we made any concession to art at all, on the same grounds as to matrimony, it would be only in favour of tragedy, which should show us that all we think most amiable is an illusion, ending in torments and in nothingness. ”

“ The womb of nature is full of crowding events, to us invisible; the ballet has machinery behind its vistas and its music; the dancers possess a character and fate in the daylight quite foreign to these fays and shepherds before the footlights; what to us is a pirouette to them is a twitch or a shilling. Shame to the impious egotism that would deny it, and, in order to spare itself the tension of faith and the labour of understanding, would pretend to find in experience nothing but a shadowy tapestry, a landscape without a substance. ”

“ Intelligence is Homeric in its pervasive light. It traces all the business of nature, eluding but not disturbing it, rendering it in fact more amiable than it is, and rescuing it from vanity.
Sense is like a lively child always at our elbow, saying, Look, look, what is that? Will is like an orator, indignantly demanding something different. History and fiction and religion are like poets, continually recomposing the facts into some tragic unity which is not in them. ”

“ The earth has its soul outside its body, as many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The winds that play about it are its breath, the water that rains down and rises again in mist is its circulating blood; and the death of the earth will come when some day it sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its soul inside its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids, and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.
No wonder that living creatures find things that are fluid and immersed in moisture friendly to the watery core of their own being. ”

“ Intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions; yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever. And the reason is this: that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or an antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child—who could have been his father?—is a poet ”