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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

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
Wait
Prove
Waiting
Cannot
Validity
Ideal
Realization
Ideals

More quotes by George Santayana

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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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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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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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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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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
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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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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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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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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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