Quote

To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

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
Men
Walking
Directions
Fight
Dislike
Fighting
Fancy
Words
Opposite
Else
Radical
Women
Opposites
Nothing
Instinct
Looks
Mets
Fancies

More quotes by George Santayana

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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
George Santayana
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
George Santayana
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
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
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.
George Santayana
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
George Santayana
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
George Santayana
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
George Santayana
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
George Santayana