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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

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
Events
Turn
Literature
Turns
Ideas
Function

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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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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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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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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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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
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We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
George Santayana
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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana
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Fear first created the gods.
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The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
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