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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

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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
Convention
Religion
Conventions
Comes
Poetic
Must
Closer
Heart
Patience
Work
Things
Endure
Motley
Men
Indeed
Bred
Opinion

More quotes by George Santayana

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Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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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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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.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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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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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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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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