"Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 2 of 24)
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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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"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."
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"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned"
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"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography."
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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience."
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"It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation."
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"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."
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"Depression is rage spread thin."
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"Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies."
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"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world."
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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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"Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely."
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"A country without a memory is a country of madmen."
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"I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world."
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"Man is not made to understand life, but to live it."
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"Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be."
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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual."
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"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."
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"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
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