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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

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
Live
Like
Insufficient
Clouds
Breathe
Air
Necessary
Wind
Society

More quotes by George Santayana

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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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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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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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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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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
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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 there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
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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
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana