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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.
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
Small
Symbol
Experience
Fraud
Change
Articles
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Consumption
Currency
Conception
Symbols
Reducible
Daily
Hype
More quotes by George Santayana
All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
George Santayana
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
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
George Santayana
Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
George Santayana
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 .
George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana
There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
George Santayana
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
