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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

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
Substance
Cause
Opinion
Causes
Nothing
Things
Instrumental
Wholly
Lower

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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.
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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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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.
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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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It is wisdom to believe the heart.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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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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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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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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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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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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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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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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