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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
Worth
Impossible
Assumptions
Living
Conclusions
Life
Assumed
Assumption
Aging
Conclusion
Necessary

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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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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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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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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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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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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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Beauty is objectified pleasure.
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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