"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 4 of 24)
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"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body."
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"The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices."
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"A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world."
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"Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention."
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"Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve."
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"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."
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"To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say."
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"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."
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"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."
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"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."
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"The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger."
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"Oaths are the fossils of piety."
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"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise."
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"Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."
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"The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation."
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"Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on."
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"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul."
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"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."
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"A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted."
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