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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

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
Prig
Libertine
Saint
Easier
Make

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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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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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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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