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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

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
Allow
Fate
Line
Printer
Single
Fates
Stand
Absent
Lines
Imperfection
Perfect
Minded
Like
Seldom

More quotes by George Santayana

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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
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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!
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
George Santayana
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
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A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana