Quote

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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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
Better
Boosted
Live
Decayed
Mind
Infection
Really
Refusal
Harmony
Illusion
Truth
Part
Refusals

More quotes by George Santayana

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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
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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.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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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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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
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The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
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What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
George Santayana
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
George Santayana