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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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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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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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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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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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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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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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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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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