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
Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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.