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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
Seen
Gothic
Better
Ruin
Nowhere
Quick
Ruins
Architecture
Lovely
Promise

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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
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The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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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 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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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 aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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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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