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

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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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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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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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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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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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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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The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
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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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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
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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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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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