Quote

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

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
Left
Illusions
Else
Realities
Reality
Hypocrisy
World
Contempt
Decent
Prefer
Lurch
Illusion
Eluded
Mere
Funk

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
George Santayana
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
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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?
George Santayana
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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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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
George Santayana
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana