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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

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
Profound
Criticism
Doubt
Truer
Favorable
Doubts
Skepticism
Conventions

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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.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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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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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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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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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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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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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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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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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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