Quote

Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.

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
Inspirational
Center
Potentially
Change
Infinite
Scope
Even
Type
Somewhat
Imagination
Organs
Though
Types
Actually
Plastic
Opportunity
Possess
Experience
Limited

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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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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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Art is a delayed echo.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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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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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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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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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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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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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 profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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