Quote

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

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
Familiar
Keeps
Fosters
Humor
Nimble
Growth
Unfamiliar
Wisdom
Familiarity
Possible
Kills
Often
Turning
Mind
Prejudice

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
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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.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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