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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
Conventions
Profound
Criticism
Doubt
Truer
Favorable
Doubts
Skepticism

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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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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.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
George Santayana