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George Santayana Quotes
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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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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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Words are weapons, and it is dangerous…to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
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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My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men into their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
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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O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
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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I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
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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Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
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 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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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
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The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
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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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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If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
love
science
George Santayana on Wikipedia
George Santayana works on Gutenberg Project
George Santayana works on Wikisource
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