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.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Santayana
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
—George Santayana
Topics: Concentration, Focus
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
—George Santayana
Topics: Promises, Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Truth
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humors.
—George Santayana
Topics: Britain
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: Possessions, Property
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
—George Santayana
Topics: Society
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
—George Santayana
Topics: Art
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
—George Santayana
Topics: Determination
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
—George Santayana
Topics: Freedom
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
—George Santayana
Topics: Pride
One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
—George Santayana
Topics: Candor, Part of The Whole, Friendship
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
—George Santayana
Topics: War
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
—George Santayana
Topics: Tragedy
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 world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
—George Santayana
Topics: Motivational
It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friendship
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
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
—George Santayana
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
—George Santayana
Topics: Fashion, Innovation
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
—George Santayana
Topics: Liberty, Simplicity
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
—George Santayana
Topics: Beauty, Virtues
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
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sacrifice
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
—George Santayana
Topics: Experience
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
—George Santayana
Topics: Science
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
—George Santayana
Topics: Women, Friendship, Men and Women, Men & Women, Men
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
—George Santayana
Topics: Confidence
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
—George Santayana
Topics: Memories, Memory, One liners
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
—George Santayana
Topics: Worth
Depression is rage spread thin.
—George Santayana
Topics: One liners, Depression, Anger
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