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Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

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
Become
May
Might
Different
Altogether
Collapse
Accidents
Knowledge
Facts

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
George Santayana
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
George Santayana
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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 there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
George Santayana
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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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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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana