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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

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
Motivational
Memories
History
Inspirational
Without
Country
Madmen
Memory

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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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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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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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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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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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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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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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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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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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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.
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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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 there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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