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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

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
Summer
Fate
Lyrical
Essence
June
Existence
Tragic
Nature
Ideal
Everything
Comic
Ideals
Garden

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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
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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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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
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