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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

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
Aspire
Mathematical
Condition
Mathematics
Conditions
Art
Music
Aspires
Sciences

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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.
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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.
George Santayana
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
George Santayana
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
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It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
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Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
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We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
George Santayana
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
George Santayana
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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
George Santayana
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
George Santayana
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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.
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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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
George Santayana
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana