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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
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
Doubt
Truer
Favorable
Doubts
Skepticism
Conventions
Profound
Criticism
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
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
George Santayana
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
George Santayana
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
George Santayana
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
George Santayana
... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
