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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

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
Paradise
University
College
Dead
Philosophy
Philosophies
Oxford

More quotes by George Santayana

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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
George Santayana
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana
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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
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
George Santayana
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
George Santayana
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
George Santayana
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
George Santayana
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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
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
George Santayana
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana