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
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
It is the acme of life to understand life.
A simple life is its own reward.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.