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George Santayana Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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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Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.
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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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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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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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Theory - when we use the word for a schema of things' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness - is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion.
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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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
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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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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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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What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
George Santayana
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God then becomes a poetic symbol for the material tenderness and the paternal strictness of this wonderful world; the ways of God become the subject-matter of physics.
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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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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And the animate world must needs concern the physicist, since it is the crown of nature, the focus where matter concentrates its fires and best shows what it is capable of doing.
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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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 fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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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Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal vision.
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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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Quote of the day
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey
George Santayana
Creative Commons
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
George Santayana works on Gutenberg Project
George Santayana works on Wikisource
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