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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

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
Illusions
Irrational
Religions
Abandon
Illusion
Vested

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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.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
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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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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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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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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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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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