Quote

Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

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
Fighting
Ideas
Banners
Men
Banner
Nerve
Nerves
Failure
Thoughts
Animal

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
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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.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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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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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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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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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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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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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.
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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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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.
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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
George Santayana