"There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 20 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all."
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"A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world."
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"You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams."
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"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."
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"Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired."
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"Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source."
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"Docility is the observable half of reason."
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"Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience."
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"A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present."
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"To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism."
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"The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands."
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"What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values."
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"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."
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"Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence."
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"The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity."
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"Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."
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"Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful."
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"Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?"
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"The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about."
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