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
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.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy
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.
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
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.
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.