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
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
...so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.