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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

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
Great
Religions
Fairy
Tales
Conscience
Religion

More quotes by George Santayana

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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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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.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
George Santayana
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
George Santayana
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
George Santayana
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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.
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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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.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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