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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

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
Justification
Sake
Bring
Experience
Uselessness
Done
Presumed
Accusation
Utility
Fatal

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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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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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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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Fear first created the gods.
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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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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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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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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
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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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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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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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The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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