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

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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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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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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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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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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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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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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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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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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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