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
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ...
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.