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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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
Inattention
Breeds
Familiarity
Contempt

More quotes by George Santayana

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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
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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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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
George Santayana
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
George Santayana
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
George Santayana
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
George Santayana
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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