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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

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
World
Inspiration
Respectable
Glints
Struggle
Mortal
Timidly
Beauty
Mortals
Blooms
Forever
Confused
Tormented
Spirit
Shot
Deluded
Light
Shots
Amid
Love
Laughter
Thorns
Life
Courage
Struggles

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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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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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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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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
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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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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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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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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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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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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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