Quote

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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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
Given
Motive
Blindly
Thought
Points
Praised
Best
Remembered
Deity
Even
Gods
Deities
Atheism
Motives
Honor
Pathetic
Morsel
Highest
Observe
Obeyed
Religion
Attributes
Lowly

More quotes by 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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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
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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
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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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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
George Santayana
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
George Santayana
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
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The earth has music for those who listen.
George Santayana