Quote

To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

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
Fighting
Fancy
Words
Opposite
Else
Radical
Women
Opposites
Nothing
Instinct
Looks
Mets
Fancies
Men
Walking
Directions
Fight
Dislike

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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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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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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
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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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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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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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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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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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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
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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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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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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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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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