Quote

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

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
Seems
Optimism
Neutralize
America
Native
Solvent
May
Elements
Thoughtlessness
Every
However
Fuse
Good
Tough
Complacency
Life
Intellectual
Alien
Powerful
Aliens
American
Element

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The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
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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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Fear first created the gods.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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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.
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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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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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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
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