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George Santayana -
The Life of Reason
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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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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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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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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Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal vision.
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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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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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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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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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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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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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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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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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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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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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
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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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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 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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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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The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
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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Quote of the day
About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert F. Kennedy
George Santayana
Creative Commons
Born:
December 16, 1863
Died:
September 26, 1952
(aged 88)
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