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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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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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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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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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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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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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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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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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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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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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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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