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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .

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
Men
Friendship
Life
Gives
Moral
Renders
Society
Aims
Religion
Imaginative
Science
Existed
Art
Aim
Giving
Solitude

More quotes by George Santayana

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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
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
George Santayana
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
George Santayana
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
George Santayana
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
George Santayana
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
George Santayana
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
George Santayana
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
George Santayana
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana