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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

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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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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.
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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.
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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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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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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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.
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