Quote

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

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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
Arms
Vision
Experience
Theoretic
Things
Echo
Crude
Echoes
Length
Poetry

More quotes by George Santayana

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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
George Santayana
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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
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Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
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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.
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.
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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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
George Santayana
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
George Santayana
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana