Quote

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

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
Willing
Meaner
Wisdom
Anyhow
Spirit
Eager
Live
Shape
Nothing
Anxiety
Way
Shapes
Life
Except
Honor

More quotes by George Santayana

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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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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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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
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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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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
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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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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana