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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

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
Nerves
Failure
Thoughts
Animal
Fighting
Ideas
Banners
Men
Banner
Nerve

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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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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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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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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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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
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The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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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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