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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.

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
Customs
Natural
Means
Political
Inertia
Government
Representative
Reason
Equilibrium
Mean
Custom
Representatives

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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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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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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
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