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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

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
Nothing
Chose
Matter
Shakespeare
Lays
Atheism
Christianity
Choice
Choices
Religion

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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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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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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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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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
George Santayana
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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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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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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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