"My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 16 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger."
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"You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him."
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"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
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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."
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"To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content."
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"Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace."
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"Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine."
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"Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion."
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"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."
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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."
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"A friend's only gift is himself."
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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."
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"The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular."
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"It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination."
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"Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise."
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"Columbus gave the world another world."
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"Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet. Habit is stronger than reason."
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"A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection."
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"Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."
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