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 one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.
It is the acme of life to understand life.
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
Heaven is to be at peace with things.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
A simple life is its own reward.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.