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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
Philosophy
Philosophers
Apologists
Study
Professional
Retained
Idea
Lawyer
Vested
Ideas
Philosopher
Detectives
Like
Illusion
Absorbed
Case
Eloquent
Usually
Defending
Cases
Lawyers
More quotes by George Santayana
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
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.
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
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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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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
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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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
