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

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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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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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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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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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The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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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.
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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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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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