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George Santayana Quotes
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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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The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
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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Science, then is the alternative consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined.
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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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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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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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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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One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
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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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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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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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
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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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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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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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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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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 speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
George Santayana
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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
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science
George Santayana on Wikipedia
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