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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
Life
Utility
Extensions
Essentially
Ideal
Useless
Ideals
Conditions
Lends
Music
Extension

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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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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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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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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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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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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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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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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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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
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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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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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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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