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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
Tales
Conscience
Religion
Great
Religions
Fairy

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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
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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.
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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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 mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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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.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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