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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

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
May
Long
Life
Prefers
Drown
Sweetness
Honey
Pleasure

More quotes by George Santayana

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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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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.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
George Santayana
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
George Santayana
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
George Santayana
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
George Santayana
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
George Santayana
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
George Santayana
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
George Santayana
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Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
George Santayana
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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
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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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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