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George Santayana
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Quotes
George Santayana quotes Showing 1-30 of 125
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”
― The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
― The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
― The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
― The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
“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.”
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“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
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“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”
― Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies
― Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies
“To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
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“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
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“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
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“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
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“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
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“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
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“Memory... is an internal rumor.”
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“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
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“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies
― Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
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“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”
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“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”
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“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
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“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”
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“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
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“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
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“To know your future you must know your past”
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“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
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“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
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“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
― The Sense of Beauty
― The Sense of Beauty
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
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“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
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“The bible is literature, not dogma.”
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“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
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Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
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“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
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