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
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The earth has music for those who listen.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.