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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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
Complicated
Miracle
Understood
Causes
Religion
Propitious
Natural
Readily
Miracles
Accidents

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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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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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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
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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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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
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One real world is enough.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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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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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 profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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