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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

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
Acquire
Meaning
Works
Nature
Firsts
Commentaries
First
Provoke
Commentary
Provoking

More quotes by George Santayana

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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
George Santayana
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
George Santayana
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
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Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
George Santayana
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Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
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Columbus gave the world another world.
George Santayana
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
George Santayana
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The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
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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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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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
George Santayana