Quote

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.

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
Come
Ill
Things
Complexes
Deciphered
Complex
Whiff
Direction
Rumble
Mere
Glimpses
Eternal
Enormously
Causes
Glimpse
Experience
Produced

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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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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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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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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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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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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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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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Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
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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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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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