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.
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy
Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
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.
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.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.