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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

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
Lends
Conditions
Extension
Music
Utility
Life
Extensions
Essentially
Ideal
Useless
Ideals

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If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but 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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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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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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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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