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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

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
Influences
Opportunities
Influence
Greatest
Worst
Opportunity
America

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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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A friend's only gift is himself.
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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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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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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
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A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
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