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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
Case
Eloquent
Usually
Defending
Cases
Lawyers
Philosophy
Philosophers
Apologists
Study
Professional
Retained
Idea
Lawyer
Vested
Ideas
Philosopher
Detectives
Like
Illusion
Absorbed
More quotes by George Santayana
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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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.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
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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.
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