Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by George Santayana, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring George Santayana quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 438 George Santayana quotes for you to read and share.

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The living have never shown me how to live. -- George Santayana
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here! -- George Santayana
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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. -- George Santayana
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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. -- George Santayana
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It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs. -- George Santayana
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art. -- George Santayana
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The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things ... -- George Santayana
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world. -- George Santayana
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It is a great bond to dislike the same things. -- George Santayana
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within. -- George Santayana
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To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content. -- George Santayana
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. -- George Santayana
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Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light. -- George Santayana
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Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. -- George Santayana
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Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress. -- George Santayana
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The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests. -- George Santayana
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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp. -- George Santayana
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Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home. -- George Santayana
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after? -- George Santayana
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The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive. -- George Santayana
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If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. -- George Santayana
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At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. -- George Santayana
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There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon. -- George Santayana
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We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on. -- George Santayana
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The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour. -- George Santayana
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There is no dunce like a mature dunce. -- George Santayana
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It is the acme of life to understand life. -- George Santayana
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. -- George Santayana
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. -- George Santayana
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Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled. -- George Santayana
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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things. -- George Santayana
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My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. -- George Santayana
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings. -- George Santayana
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It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination. -- George Santayana
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world. -- George Santayana
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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends. -- George Santayana
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness. -- George Santayana
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Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. -- George Santayana
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Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. -- George Santayana
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? -- George Santayana
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen. -- George Santayana
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. -- George Santayana
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Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts. -- George Santayana
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You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. -- George Santayana
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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine ... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit. -- George Santayana
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. -- George Santayana
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source. -- George Santayana
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The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt. -- George Santayana
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The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. -- George Santayana
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Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities. -- George Santayana
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There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable. -- George Santayana
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There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. -- George Santayana
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The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns. -- George Santayana
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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are. -- George Santayana
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Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility. -- George Santayana
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. -- George Santayana
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. -- George Santayana
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The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. -- George Santayana
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. -- George Santayana
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Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves. -- George Santayana
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. -- George Santayana
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence. -- George Santayana
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism. -- George Santayana
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. -- George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity ... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods. -- George Santayana
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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life. -- George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. -- George Santayana
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By obedience and self-control come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility; satisfy -- George Santayana
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Heaven is to be at peace with things. -- George Santayana
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked. -- George Santayana
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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. -- George Santayana
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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases. -- George Santayana
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Man's most serious activity is play. -- George Santayana
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours. -- George Santayana
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love. -- George Santayana
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I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish. -- George Santayana
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A good citizen must follow the movement of public affairs, so as to cast his vote intelligently, and know whether the party in power deserved his vote. -- George Santayana
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The highest form of vanity is love of fame. -- George Santayana
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Philosophers are as jealous as woman; each wants a monopoly of praise. -- George Santayana
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior. -- George Santayana
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Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine. -- George Santayana
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Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything. -- George Santayana
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Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread. -- George Santayana
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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. -- George Santayana
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Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them. -- George Santayana
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. -- George Santayana
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Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. -- George Santayana
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Music is essentially useless, as life is. -- George Santayana
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So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed. -- George Santayana
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Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. -- George Santayana
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. -- George Santayana
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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 Santayana
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In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else -- George Santayana
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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. -- George Santayana
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The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity. -- George Santayana
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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. -- George Santayana
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge. -- George Santayana
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Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. -- George Santayana
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome. -- George Santayana
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers. -- George Santayana
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To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful. -- George Santayana
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit. -- George Santayana
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Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others. -- George Santayana
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To be interested in the changing seasons is ... a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. -- George Santayana
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. -- George Santayana
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works. -- George Santayana
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification. -- George Santayana
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All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. -- George Santayana
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love. -- George Santayana
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What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are. -- George Santayana
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. -- George Santayana
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Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. -- George Santayana
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world. -- George Santayana
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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey. -- George Santayana
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Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one. -- George Santayana
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Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life. -- George Santayana
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The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life. -- George Santayana
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Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. -- George Santayana
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much. -- George Santayana
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The bible is literature, not dogma. -- George Santayana
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The man who is not permitted to own is owned. -- George Santayana
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The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again -- George Santayana
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If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them. -- George Santayana
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It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. -- George Santayana
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An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. -- George Santayana
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. -- George Santayana
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As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends. -- George Santayana
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also. -- George Santayana
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred. -- George Santayana
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything. -- George Santayana
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Fear first created the gods. -- George Santayana
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. -- George Santayana
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The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. -- George Santayana
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events. -- George Santayana
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In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. -- George Santayana
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. -- George Santayana
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Depression is rage spread thin. -- George Santayana
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Sanity is madness put to good use. -- George Santayana
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one. -- George Santayana
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Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar. -- George Santayana
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it. -- George Santayana
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Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers. -- George Santayana
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. -- George Santayana
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A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. -- George Santayana
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Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. -- George Santayana
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. -- George Santayana
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. -- George Santayana
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It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation. -- George Santayana
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That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. -- George Santayana
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When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome? -- George Santayana
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. -- George Santayana
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better. -- George Santayana
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Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. -- George Santayana
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A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. -- George Santayana
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. -- George Santayana
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All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg. -- George Santayana
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things. -- George Santayana
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There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair. -- George Santayana
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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. -- George Santayana
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In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated. -- George Santayana
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The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend. -- George Santayana
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A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. -- George Santayana
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There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books. -- George Santayana
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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive. -- George Santayana
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Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. -- George Santayana
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Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. -- George Santayana
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind. -- George Santayana
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction. -- George Santayana
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Historical 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 Santayana
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Beauty is objectified pleasure. -- George Santayana
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Docility is the observable half of reason. -- George Santayana
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Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. -- George Santayana
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It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health. -- George Santayana
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Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world. -- George Santayana
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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. -- George Santayana
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes. -- George Santayana
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A simple life is its own reward. -- George Santayana
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The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon. -- George Santayana
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We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society? -- George Santayana
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When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone. -- George Santayana
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Man is not made to understand life, but to live it. -- George Santayana
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A friend's only gift is himself. -- George Santayana
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don't make anybody long-lived or useful. -- George Santayana
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing. -- George Santayana
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The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk. -- George Santayana
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Words are weapons, and it is dangerous ... to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy. -- George Santayana
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Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations -- George Santayana
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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt. -- George Santayana
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. -- George Santayana
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It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss. -- George Santayana
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment. -- George Santayana
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Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. -- George Santayana
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Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself. -- George Santayana
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. -- George Santayana
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. -- George Santayana
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations. -- George Santayana
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If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk. -- George Santayana
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It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility -- George Santayana
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Habit is stronger than reason. -- George Santayana
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. -- George Santayana
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To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. -- George Santayana
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form. -- George Santayana
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said. -- George Santayana
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. -- George Santayana
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All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced. -- George Santayana
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary. -- George Santayana
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Memory... is an internal rumor. -- George Santayana
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There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world. -- George Santayana
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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. -- George Santayana
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Beware of long arguments and long beards. -- George Santayana
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America is a young country with an old mentality. -- George Santayana
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. -- George Santayana
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The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. -- George Santayana
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If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. -- George Santayana
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To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried. -- George Santayana
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I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism. -- George Santayana
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be. -- George Santayana
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History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory -- George Santayana
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. -- George Santayana
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. -- George Santayana
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Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them. -- George Santayana
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Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it. -- George Santayana
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Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. -- George Santayana
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains. -- George Santayana
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. -- George Santayana
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. -- George Santayana
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Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots. -- George Santayana
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations. -- George Santayana
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what. -- George Santayana
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Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. -- George Santayana
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Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet.
Habit is stronger than reason. -- George Santayana
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The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality. -- George Santayana
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. -- George Santayana
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An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood. -- George Santayana
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Faith in the intellect ... is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits -- George Santayana
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger. -- George Santayana
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The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. -- George Santayana
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war. -- George Santayana
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You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him. -- George Santayana
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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. -- George Santayana
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It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. -- George Santayana
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. -- George Santayana
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Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods. -- George Santayana
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Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. -- George Santayana
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Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. -- George Santayana
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All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato. -- George Santayana
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The wisest man has something yet to learn. -- George Santayana
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind. -- George Santayana
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily. -- George Santayana
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All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us. -- George Santayana
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I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. -- George Santayana
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence -- George Santayana
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A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity -- George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. -- George Santayana
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The Soul is the voice of the body's interests. -- George Santayana
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words. -- George Santayana
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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder. -- George Santayana
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. -- George Santayana
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The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms. -- George Santayana
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For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep. -- George Santayana
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The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it. -- George Santayana
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The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes. -- George Santayana
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Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate. -- George Santayana
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. -- George Santayana
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If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters. -- George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye. -- George Santayana
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair. -- George Santayana
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise. -- George Santayana
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Consciousness is a born hermit. -- George Santayana
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Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited. -- George Santayana
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A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills. -- George Santayana
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Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They may all collapse altogether. -- George Santayana
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Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. -- George Santayana
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. -- George Santayana
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By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. -- George Santayana
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values. -- George Santayana
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all. -- George Santayana
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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art . -- George Santayana
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable. -- George Santayana
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty. -- George Santayana
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger. -- George Santayana
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Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim. -- George Santayana
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Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good. -- George Santayana
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Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it. -- George Santayana
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood. -- George Santayana
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any. -- George Santayana
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve. -- George Santayana
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Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair. -- George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. -- George Santayana
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. -- George Santayana
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Sanity is a madness put to good uses. -- George Santayana
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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection. -- George Santayana
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Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. -- George Santayana
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In Greece wise men speak and fools decide. -- George Santayana
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The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger. -- George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. -- George Santayana
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding. -- George Santayana
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things. -- George Santayana
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Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies. -- George Santayana
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center. -- George Santayana
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Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. -- George Santayana
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The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. -- George Santayana
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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. -- George Santayana
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture. -- George Santayana
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Communes also with the Divine, and in thinking out its own deepest thoughts, thinks out the thoughts of the great Creator Himself, becomes one with Him, finds its final realisation through absorption into Him, and in His light sees light. -- George Santayana
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty. -- George Santayana
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Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ... -- George Santayana
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My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule. -- George Santayana
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands. -- George Santayana
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To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired. -- George Santayana
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself ... It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices. -- George Santayana
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The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer. -- George Santayana
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. -- George Santayana
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We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together. -- George Santayana
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Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life ... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds? -- George Santayana
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing. -- George Santayana
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity. -- George Santayana
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism. -- George Santayana
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The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. -- George Santayana
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The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything. -- George Santayana
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies. -- George Santayana
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It is wisdom to believe the heart. -- George Santayana
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length. -- George Santayana
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What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word
the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water. -- George Santayana
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me. -- George Santayana
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Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. -- George Santayana
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A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel. -- George Santayana
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What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like? -- George Santayana
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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him. -- George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. -- George Santayana
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Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality. -- George Santayana
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. -- George Santayana
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To know your future you must know your past -- George Santayana
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The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed. -- George Santayana
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Columbus gave the world another world. -- George Santayana
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He seems indeed to have been a man of exceptional kindness and amiability, -- George Santayana
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There is no right government except good government. -- George Santayana
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To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful. -- George Santayana
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned -- George Santayana
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost. -- George Santayana
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The worship of power is an old religion. -- George Santayana
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Love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers. -- George Santayana
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism. -- George Santayana
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere. -- George Santayana
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. -- George Santayana
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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard. -- George Santayana
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums. -- George Santayana
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A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character. -- George Santayana
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition. -- George Santayana
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public. -- George Santayana
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. -- George Santayana
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn. -- George Santayana
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies. -- George Santayana
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Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends. -- George Santayana
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true. -- George Santayana
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible. -- George Santayana
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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others. -- George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. -- George Santayana
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Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. -- George Santayana
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful. -- George Santayana
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The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. -- George Santayana
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces. -- George Santayana
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Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end. -- George Santayana
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Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. -- George Santayana
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience. -- George Santayana
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility. -- George Santayana
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. -- George Santayana
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I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me. -- George Santayana
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. -- George Santayana
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All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death. -- George Santayana
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Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it. -- George Santayana
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The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands. -- George Santayana
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Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble. -- George Santayana
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To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. -- George Santayana
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Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. -- George Santayana
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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith. -- George Santayana
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. -- George Santayana
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess. -- George Santayana
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Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely. -- George Santayana
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One real world is enough. -- George Santayana
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Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. -- George Santayana
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. -- George Santayana
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Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental. -- George Santayana
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors. -- George Santayana
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity. -- George Santayana
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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. -- George Santayana
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. -- George Santayana
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Why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together. -- George Santayana
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance. -- George Santayana
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There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he. -- George Santayana
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with. -- George Santayana
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. -- George Santayana
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics. -- George Santayana
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Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. -- George Santayana
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The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. -- George Santayana
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The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. -- George Santayana
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The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. -- George Santayana
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Oaths are the fossils of piety. -- George Santayana
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies. -- George Santayana
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients. -- George Santayana
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others. -- George Santayana
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People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another. -- George Santayana
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All spiritual interests are supported by animal life. -- George Santayana
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well. -- George Santayana
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. -- George Santayana
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt. -- George Santayana
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. -- George Santayana
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Wisdom comes from disillusionment. -- George Santayana
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on. -- George Santayana
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He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel) -- George Santayana
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It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. -- George Santayana
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The wisest mind has something yet to learn. -- George Santayana
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age. -- George Santayana
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Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable. -- George Santayana
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Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy. -- George Santayana
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit. -- George Santayana
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. -- George Santayana
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Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses. -- George Santayana
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Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence. -- George Santayana
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The wisest mind hath something yet to learn. -- George Santayana
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths. -- George Santayana
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Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. -- George Santayana
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Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions. -- George Santayana
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. -- George Santayana
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In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf. -- George Santayana
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. -- George Santayana
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience. -- George Santayana
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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center. -- George Santayana
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Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies. -- George Santayana
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice. -- George Santayana
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets. -- George Santayana
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Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. -- George Santayana
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke. -- George Santayana
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The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably. -- George Santayana
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Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. -- George Santayana
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity. -- George Santayana
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. -- George Santayana