"The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art."
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George Santayana quotes (page 9 of 24)
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"Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right."
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"America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences."
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"Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape."
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"Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions."
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"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."
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"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."
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"A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud."
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"Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others."
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"The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again"
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"Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers."
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"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten."
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"Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament."
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"The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it."
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"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing."
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"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
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"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
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"Wisdom comes by disillusionment."
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"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."
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"Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous."
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