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
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Habit is stronger than reason.
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.
A friend's only gift is himself.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.