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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

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
Subjects
Interested
Poor
History
Art
Nothing
Really
Melancholy
Subject

More quotes by George Santayana

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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George Santayana
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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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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
George Santayana
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
George Santayana
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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.
George Santayana
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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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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana