“An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion that showed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“… even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions. Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Immortality
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“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word–the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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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.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Imagination
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“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Intelligence
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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.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“… the God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estrangesthem.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Atheism
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“The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“It is possible to be a master in false philosophy–easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Happiness
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“The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Fear
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“The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Conversation
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“Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
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“The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.”
George Santayana
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Commitment
