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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

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
Blindness
Judged
Atheism
Life

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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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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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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
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