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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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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
Public
Converted
Since
Muse
Long
Priests
Poets
Popular
Ancient
Poet
Retailing
Poetry
Parish

More quotes by George Santayana

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The earth has music for those who listen.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
George Santayana
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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.
George Santayana
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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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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.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George Santayana
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The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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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.
George Santayana