"A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 22 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?"
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"The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms."
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"A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether."
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"All spiritual interests are supported by animal life."
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"I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me."
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"Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies."
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"Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things."
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"Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes."
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"To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful."
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"The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence."
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"Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?"
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"Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends."
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"The living have never shown me how to live."
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"I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me."
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"To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried."
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"...science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action."
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"An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there."
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"One real world is enough."
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". . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play."
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