Quote

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

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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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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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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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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.
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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Beauty is objectified pleasure.
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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.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
George Santayana
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
George Santayana
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
George Santayana
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
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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.
George Santayana