"The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 15 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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"
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"Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity."
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"For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep."
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"To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language."
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"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak."
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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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"Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."
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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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"There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable."
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"Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether."
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"He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing."
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"The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder."
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"In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess."
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"A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character."
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"Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length."
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"My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable."
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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. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire."
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"There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair."
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"That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject."
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