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
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.