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George Santayana -
The Life of Reason
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.
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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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George Santayana
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When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
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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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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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Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
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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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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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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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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Knowledge is the recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
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In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
George Santayana
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana
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An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
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[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.
George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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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