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
Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.