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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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
Ideas
Philosopher
Detectives
Like
Illusion
Absorbed
Case
Eloquent
Usually
Defending
Cases
Lawyers
Philosophy
Philosophers
Apologists
Study
Professional
Retained
Idea
Lawyer
Vested
More quotes by George Santayana
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
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
George Santayana
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
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
George Santayana
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
George Santayana
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
