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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

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
Everything
Good
Grain
Salt
Lies
Taking
Humor
Wisdom
Lying

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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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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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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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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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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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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.
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Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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