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

More quotes by George Santayana

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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
George Santayana
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
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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
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Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
George Santayana
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Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
George Santayana
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Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana