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George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous George Santayana Quotes

“Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.”

IdeasRealityTruthPastFatherMemoriesDarkInterestingSunTruth IsStandardsShiningSilentWitnessAweCoveredAnxiousOur FatherGarmentsOur MemoriesAssertionEclecticSeamless
Book:Scepticism and Animal Faith
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“A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.”

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Book:The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One
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“The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.”

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Book:The Works of George Santayana
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“The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science”

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Book:The Sense of Beauty
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