To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. May 9, 1917
A collection of extracts: how wonderful! Loeser once had a statuette of Locke, which he meant to give to Wm James. When James heard of it, he exclaimed: “A statuette, that is fame indeed! Anybody can have a statue, but a statuette is true immortality.” So I say: any one can fill a shelf with his complete works; but a book of elegant extracts is for the few only, the few who, like Browning and me, have written wisely but too much. To be quite frank, I had—vaguely—thought of paying myself this compliment some day, when the ontology was finished, and I might find an egotistical pleasure in my old age in turning over the good things I had once been capable of saying. But by all odds, it is better that you should do it, if you are inexplicably so inclined. It is an overwhelming compliment to me, and a great service at the same time, because I think not only my style but my ideas will gain by being loosened from the academic and professorial mortar in which they have been set, because of the trade of system-building. I shall probably be much enlightened myself by beholding my naked little collection of ideas.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC