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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

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
Substantially
Advantage
Philosophy
System
True
Great

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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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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.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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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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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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