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

More quotes by George Santayana

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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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Columbus gave the world another world.
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
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