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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
Ideas
Philosopher
Detectives
Like
Illusion
Absorbed
Case
Eloquent
Usually
Defending
Cases
Lawyers
Philosophy
Philosophers
Apologists
Study
Professional
Retained
Idea
Lawyer
Vested

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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.
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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Columbus gave the world another world.
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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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.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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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.
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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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