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George Santayana Quotes
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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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In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; … They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.
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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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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One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
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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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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There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.
George Santayana
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
George Santayana
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It is a pleasant surprise to him [the 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 the sailors could have better when singing his songs.
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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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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Science, then is the alternative consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined.
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 effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
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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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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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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.
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Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.
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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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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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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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.
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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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Quote of the day
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly … very slowly.
Gypsy Rose Lee
George Santayana
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Born:
December 16, 1863
Died:
September 26, 1952
(aged 88)
Bio:
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.
Known for:
The Life of Reason
The Sense of Beauty (1896)
The Last Puritan (1935)
Three philosophical poets (1910)
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Most used words:
life
man
religion
happiness
experience
philosophy
mind
human
live
ideal
soul
nature
natural
love
science
George Santayana on Wikipedia
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George Santayana works on Wikisource
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