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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

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
Today
Live
Everything
Great
Slums
World
Appalling
Mediocrity
Intellectual
Simply

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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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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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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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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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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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Man's most serious activity is play.
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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.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
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Art is a delayed echo.
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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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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
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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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