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

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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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Beauty is objectified pleasure.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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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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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
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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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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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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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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
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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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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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Columbus gave the world another world.
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