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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

George Santayana

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George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Buddhist
Lows
Friendship
Friends
Evil
Best
Men
Doers
People
Virtuous

More quotes by George Santayana

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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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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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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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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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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana