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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
Importance
Poet
Imagination
Dominates
Reality
Exact
Ends
Measure
Degree
Degrees
Dignity

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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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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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It is wisdom to believe the heart.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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Fear first created the gods.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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