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
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
Philosophers are as jealous as woman; each wants a monopoly of praise.
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.