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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
Memories
History
Inspirational
Without
Country
Madmen
Memory
Motivational

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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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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.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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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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Man's most serious activity is play.
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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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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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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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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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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