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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

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
Self
Contemptible
Fatal
Assurance
Confidence
Unless
Knowledge

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Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
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We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
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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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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.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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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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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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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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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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