Quote

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

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
Missing
Shortcomings
Habit
Demands
Beauty
Notice
Looking
Hungry
Sense
Satisfaction
Makes
Complete
Everything
Perfection
Things
Demand
Misses

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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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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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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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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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