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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

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
Presses
Press
Skeptic
Atheism
Courtesy
Doubt
Doubts
Kind
Skepticism
Would
Polite
Conventions
Offense

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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
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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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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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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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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
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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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A simple life is its own reward.
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
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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.
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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