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
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.
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.
Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
A friend's only gift is himself.