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
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.