Quote

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

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
Ideas
Seem
Institutions
Bubble
Come
Progress
Touch
Soap
Word
Foundation
Bubbles
Without
Idea
Evolution
Catastrophe
Really
Stills
Materials
Institution
Crumbles
Like
Seems
Stronger
Dominant
Catastrophes
Still
Standing
Suddenly
Swollen
May
Source
Material
Foundations

More quotes by George Santayana

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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
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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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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
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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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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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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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Fear first created the gods.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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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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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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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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