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
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
The living have never shown me how to live.
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.