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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
Lawyer
Vested
Idea
Philosopher
Detectives
Ideas
Illusion
Absorbed
Like
Eloquent
Case
Defending
Usually
Lawyers
Cases
Philosophers
Apologists
Philosophy
Professional
Retained
Study
More quotes by George Santayana
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
George Santayana
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
George Santayana
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
George Santayana
The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
George Santayana
Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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.
George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
George Santayana
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana