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
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They may all collapse altogether.
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.