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
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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.
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