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
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence
Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should makes us philosophers
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome
Wealth, religion and military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine then out of a prig
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.