Quote

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.

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
Happiness
Substitute
Hope
Substitutes
Nature
Fixed
Without
Affection
Right
Grateful
Life
Consciousness
Environment
Within
Quicken

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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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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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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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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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
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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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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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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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Man's most serious activity is play.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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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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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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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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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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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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Habit is stronger than reason.
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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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