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
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Wealth, religion and military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.