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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
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More quotes by George Santayana
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
George Santayana
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
George Santayana
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
George Santayana
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
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 .
George Santayana
The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
