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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

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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
George Santayana
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
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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.
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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
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A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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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