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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Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand. The whole world is doing things.
—George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
—George Santayana
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
—George Santayana
Topics: Emotions
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
—George Santayana
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Wisdom
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians.
—George Santayana
Topics: Past, Progress, Reflection, History
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible.
—George Santayana
Topics: Past, Future, The Past
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 cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friendship
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
—George Santayana
Topics: Unhappiness
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
—George Santayana
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
—George Santayana
Topics: Opinion
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 highest form of vanity is love of fame.
—George Santayana
Topics: Fame
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana
Topics: Happiness, Experiment
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