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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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
Efficacious
Rhetorical
Prosperity
Victory
Worth
Military
Wealth
Religion

More quotes by George Santayana

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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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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.
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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
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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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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
George Santayana
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
George Santayana
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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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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
George Santayana
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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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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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Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana