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
George Santayana quotes about
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.