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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

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
Language
Speak
Practicing
Without
Attempting
Specific
Attempt
Possible
Religious
Religion

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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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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
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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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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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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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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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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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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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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.
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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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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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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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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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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