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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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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
Living
Conclusions
Life
Assumed
Assumption
Aging
Conclusion
Necessary
Worth
Impossible
Assumptions

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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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A simple life is its own reward.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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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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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
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