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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
Ruins
Architecture
Lovely
Promise
Seen
Gothic
Better
Ruin
Nowhere
Quick

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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
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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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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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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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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
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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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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
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