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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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
Certain
Views
Reward
Women
Knowing
Closer
May
Known
Nonsense
Might
Upon
Rewards
Like
Woman
Distance
Pain
Truly
Nature
View
Delightfully
Beautiful
Cases
Pains
More quotes by George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
The earth has music for those who listen.
George Santayana
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
George Santayana
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
George Santayana
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George Santayana
Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
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
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
George Santayana
The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
George Santayana
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana
