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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

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
Absolutely
Existence
Evil
Time
Optimism
Ruins
Total
Anywhere

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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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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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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.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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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.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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