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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
Nowhere
Quick
Ruins
Architecture
Lovely
Promise
Seen
Gothic
Better
Ruin

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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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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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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
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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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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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