George Santayana
George Santayana
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe...
NationalitySpanish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 December 1863
CityMadrid, Spain
CountrySpain
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
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.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.