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
To understand one's self is the classic form of consolation; to delude one's self is the romantic
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.
A friend's only gift is himself.
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine then out of a prig
To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.