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About this quote

What does it mean?
Santayana describes himself as free through exile, moving across worlds.
In plain terms
Exile made him free and able to travel through worlds.
What can you take from it?
Freedom can come from displacement.

Where it applies

  • reading poetry
  • writing

Putting it to work

  • reflect on freedom
  • value displacement

Questions to consider

  • Is exile freedom?
  • How does movement affect the self?

Another view

Exile is often painful and not truly liberating.

More from George Santayana

  1. They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without h…

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  2. The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic…

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  3. There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

    Permalink to quote #5

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