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Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

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
Like
Memory
Forgetful
Bird
Displays
Youth
Instinctive
Conditions
Degenerates
Becomes
Repeating
Memories
Reaction
Age
Display
Chirp
Self
Reactions
Incorrigible

More quotes by George Santayana

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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
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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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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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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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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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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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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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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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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
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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.
George Santayana