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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

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
Better
Ruin
Nowhere
Quick
Ruins
Architecture
Lovely
Promise
Seen
Gothic

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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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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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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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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.
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Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
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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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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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