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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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
Inattention
Breeds
Familiarity
Contempt

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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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Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.
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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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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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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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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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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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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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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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