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.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors
England is not the best possible world but it is the best actual country, and a great rest after America
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses