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
Vision
Experience
Theoretic
Things
Echo
Crude
Echoes
Length
Poetry
Arms

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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.
George Santayana
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
George Santayana
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
George Santayana
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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
George Santayana
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana