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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

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
Depends
Savages
Among
Perpetual
Progress
Improve
Possible
Improvement
Experience
Absolutes
Change
Absolute
Consisting
Direction
Retained
Remains
Infancy

More quotes by George Santayana

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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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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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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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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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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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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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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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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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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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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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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
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