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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

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
Degree
Degrees
Dignity
Importance
Poet
Imagination
Dominates
Reality
Exact
Ends
Measure

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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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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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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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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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
George Santayana
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
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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.
George Santayana
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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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.
George Santayana