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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Music is essentially useless, as life is.
—George Santayana
Topics: Music
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
—George Santayana
Topics: Art
Depression is rage spread thin.
—George Santayana
Topics: One liners, Anger, Depression
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
—George Santayana
Topics: Happiness
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
—George Santayana
Topics: History, One liners
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
—George Santayana
Topics: Profanity, Vulgarity, Swearing, Promises
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
—George Santayana
Topics: Inferiority
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
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sympathy
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
—George Santayana
Topics: Instincts
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Friendship, Part of The Whole
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
—George Santayana
Topics: Society
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
—George Santayana
Topics: Science
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
—George Santayana
Topics: Confidence
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
—George Santayana
Topics: Superstition
Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand. The whole world is doing things.
—George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
—George Santayana
Topics: Society
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
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana
Topics: Difficulty, Education
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
—George Santayana
Topics: Fear
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine…. If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
—George Santayana
Topics: Space, World
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
—George Santayana
Topics: Words
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Wisdom, Balance, Quotations, Proverbs
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friendship
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
—George Santayana
Topics: Soul
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
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: It keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
—George Santayana
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Ego
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
—George Santayana
Topics: Pride
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
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