George Santayana (1863–1952,) born Jorge Augustin Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana, was a Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He made significant contributions to aesthetics, speculative philosophy, and literary criticism.
Born in Madrid, Spain, Santayana grew up in Boston from the age of eight. He was educated at Harvard and stayed on as faculty until 1912. With the aid of a small inheritance, he subsequently resided in Europe, primarily in England and France. In 1924, he settled in Rome and remained there for the rest of his life. After 1939, Santayana withdrew from the world—a solitude revealed in the moral detachment of his writing. He emphasized not only the biological nature of the mind but also its creative and rational powers.
Santayana is renowned for developing a personal form of critical realism that was skeptical, materialistic, and humanistic. His later philosophy attempted to blend philosophical materialism with a deep concern for spiritual values and the natural world.
Santayana’s works include The Sense of Beauty (1896,) The Life of Reason (1905–06,) Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923,) The Realms of Being (1924,) and the popular novel The Last Puritan (1935.) He also published several volumes of poetry, which were compiled into The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition (1979.) His autobiography is Persons and Places (3 vols., 1944–53.)
Santayana’s most famous line about history is also one of the least accurately quoted: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (From The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905:284.)
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
—George Santayana
Topics: Soul
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
—George Santayana
Topics: Family
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
—George Santayana
Topics: City Life, Cities
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
—George Santayana
Topics: Life, Luck, Living, Realistic Expectations
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
—George Santayana
Topics: Art
A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
—George Santayana
Topics: Memory, The Past
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
—George Santayana
Topics: Words
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy
—George Santayana
Topics: Weapon, Words
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
—George Santayana
Topics: Reason
A Californian who I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion the man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert.
—George Santayana
Topics: Wilderness
Habit is stronger than reason.
—George Santayana
Topics: Habit, Habits
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
—George Santayana
Topics: Truth
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
—George Santayana
Topics: Profanity, Vulgarity, Swearing, Promises
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
—George Santayana
Topics: Wisdom, Adversity, Difficulties
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
—George Santayana
Topics: Facts
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
—George Santayana
Topics: Kindness, Service, Giving, Charity, Sharing
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
—George Santayana
Topics: Parenting, Parents
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
—George Santayana
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
—George Santayana
Topics: Atheism
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
—George Santayana
Topics: Food
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
—George Santayana
Topics: Beauty, Love
Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidely barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court.
—George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
—George Santayana
Topics: Art
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
—George Santayana
Topics: Science
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
—George Santayana
Topics: Property, Possessions
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
—George Santayana
Topics: Blessings, Gratitude, Appreciation
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
—George Santayana
Topics: Music
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
—George Santayana
Topics: Potential
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of the content.
—George Santayana
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sacrifice
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
—George Santayana
Topics: America
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
—George Santayana
Topics: Worth
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
—George Santayana
Topics: Innovation, Fashion
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
—George Santayana
Topics: Perspective
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
—George Santayana
Topics: Patriotism
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Wisdom, Quotations, Proverbs, Proverbial Wisdom, Balance
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
—George Santayana
Topics: Unhappiness, Sadness
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
—George Santayana
Topics: Beauty, Virtues
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
—George Santayana
Topics: Inferiority
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
—George Santayana
Topics: Confidence, Admiration
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