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

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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 world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
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Fear first created the gods.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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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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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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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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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
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