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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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
Memories
Infancy
Wisdom
Condemned
Cannot
Repeat
Past
Repeats
Change
Insight
Remember
Advice
Depends
Progress
Consisting

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
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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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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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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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Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
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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 me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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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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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.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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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.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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