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
Wealth, religion and military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Fear first created the gods.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors
England is not the best possible world but it is the best actual country, and a great rest after America
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses