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
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification