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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

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
Terrorism
Overcoming
Terror
Sense
Finitude
Men
Inferiority
Selfishness
Overcome
Selfish

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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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