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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.

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
Less
Opposites
Proverbs
Truth
However
Quotations
Every
Balance
Applied
Depends
Occasion
Saying
Depend
Wise
Occasions
Wisdom
Entirely
Almost
Opposite
Notoriously

More quotes by George Santayana

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Man's most serious activity is play.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
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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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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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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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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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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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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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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.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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