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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

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
Always
Simmering
Conventional
Reflection
Surface
Fantasy
Speech
Dream

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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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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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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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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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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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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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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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