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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

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
Values
Faculty
Nature
Account
Must
Tendencies
Conspicuous
Mind
Radical
Widespread
Accounts
Adequate
Value
Observe
Principles
Passes
Beauty
Tendency

More quotes by George Santayana

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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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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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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
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To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
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Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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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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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana