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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

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
Known
Thunder
Deaf
Lightning
Clouds
Blind
Battle

More quotes by George Santayana

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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
George Santayana
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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.
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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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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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
George Santayana
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George Santayana
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana
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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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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
George Santayana
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The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
George Santayana
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
George Santayana
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The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
George Santayana
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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
George Santayana
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana