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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

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
Language
Speak
Practicing
Without
Attempting
Specific
Attempt
Possible
Religious
Religion

More quotes by George Santayana

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The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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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.
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
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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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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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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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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
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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