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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.

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
Conscience
Gather
Habit
Comforting
Opinion
Consensus
Social
Assurance
Assurances
Men
Continually
Convention
Conventions
Suggested
Habits
Originally
Opinions
Borrowed

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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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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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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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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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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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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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Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
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