A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George SantayanaFriendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
George SantayanaIt is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
George SantayanaHistorical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
George SantayanaThere is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.
George Santayana