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
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which are beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
Docility is the observable half of reason.
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
Philosophers are as jealous as woman; each wants a monopoly of praise.
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.