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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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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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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 body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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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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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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It is wisdom to believe the heart.
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
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