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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
Idea
Lawyer
Vested
Ideas
Philosopher
Detectives
Like
Illusion
Absorbed
Case
Eloquent
Usually
Defending
Cases
Lawyers
Philosophy
Philosophers
Apologists
Study
Professional
Retained
More quotes by George Santayana
The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
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
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
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
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
George Santayana
Beauty is objectified pleasure.
George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
George Santayana
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
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
George Santayana
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
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
