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
I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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.
It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
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