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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.

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
First
Skeptic
Thinking
Chastity
Shameful
Skepticism
Surrender
Intellect
Soon
Comer
Firsts
Ripeness

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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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.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Columbus gave the world another world.
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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A friend's only gift is himself.
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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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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana
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Art is a delayed echo.
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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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 muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana