Quote

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

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
Humans
Winning
Hatred
Empires
Way
Heaven
Ambition
Bloody
Life
Living
Kindness
Temper
Anguished
World
Spirit
Neither
Gentle
Virulent
Nature
Worth
Aim
Stoop
Hands
Humor
Vain
Stoops
May
Rest
Prosperity
Flexible
Human
Philosophy
Price
Empire

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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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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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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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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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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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.
George Santayana