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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
Practicing
Speak
Attempting
Without
Specific
Attempt
Possible
Religious
Religion

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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
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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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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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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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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat 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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The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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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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