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

More quotes by George Santayana

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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
George Santayana
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
George Santayana
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If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
George Santayana
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
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One real world is enough.
George Santayana
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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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.
George Santayana
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
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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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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
George Santayana