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George Santayana -
The Life of Reason
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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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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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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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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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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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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Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
George Santayana
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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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It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.
George Santayana
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
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 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 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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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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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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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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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