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
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.
Man's most serious activity is play.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.