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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
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
Thousand
Trace
Though
Background
Overlay
Happiness
Standard
Affinities
Success
Backgrounds
Override
Felt
Remain
Profoundest
Standards
Considerations
Later
Affinity
Succeed
Readily
More quotes by George Santayana
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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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.
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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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
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.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
George Santayana
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
George Santayana
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
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
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
George Santayana
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
George Santayana
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
