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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

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
Like
Soil
Calling
Courage
Virtue
Politics
Call
War
Love
Debauchery

More quotes by George Santayana

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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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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.
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What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
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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.
George Santayana
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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
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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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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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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.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
George Santayana