Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, 1863 – 1952
Born: 16 December 1863, Madrid, Spain
Died: 26 September 1952, Rome, Italy
Josefina Borrás had been married to a Boston merchant until his death, she returned to her native Spain and married a Spanish diplomat, Augustín Ruiz de Santayana in 1862. The family lived at Madrid and Ávila until 1872 when they had all moved to Boston, although Señor Santayana immediately returned permanently to Spain. Jorge Anglicized his name while attending Boston Latin School and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 1886. After two years studying at Berlin he returned to Harvard to teach philosophy, and studied at King’s College, Cambridge in 1896-1897. In 1912 he resigned from Harvard and spent the rest of his life in Europe, originally at Ávila, Paris, and Oxford. He started wintering at Roma in 1920, and finally lived there full time until his death. He was part of what has been called the Golden Age of the Harvard philosophy department, and he wrote another 19 books while declining numerous academic positions during his four decades in Europe. In addition to his books, eight volumes including over 3,000 letters have been published. His aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” was, as far as I can tell, the first quotation your Quotemaster ever committed to memory.
George Santayana quotes:
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
“Why I Am Not a Marxist” in Modern Maturity (April 1935)
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
The Life of Reason, Vol. II, “Reason in Society”, Chap. VIII: “Ideal Society” (1905-1906)
A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
George Santayana
The Life of Reason (1905)
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.
George Santayana
The Sense of Beauty, Pt. III: “Form”, p. 121 (1896)
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
letter to two Bryn Mawr students, from Rome (11 December 1934)
A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
George Santayana
The Life of Reason, Vol. II, “Reason in Society”, Chap. VII: “Patriotism” (1905-1906)
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
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
George Santayana
Little Essays (1920)
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
George Santayana
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
George Santayana
Dialogues in Limbo, “Normal Madness”, Chap. 3, P. 62 (1926)
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
The Last Puritan (1935)
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
George Santayana
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental
George Santayana
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience; the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
George Santayana
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
George Santayana
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
George Santayana
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery busy applying first principles to trifles.
George Santayana
By nature’s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
George Santayana
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma; if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
George Santayana
Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
George Santayana
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
George Santayana
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
George Santayana
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
George Santayana
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
George Santayana
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
George Santayana
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
George Santayana
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
George Santayana
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
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
George Santayana
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another: people are friends in spots.
George Santayana
Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better.
George Santayana
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.
George Santayana
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
George Santayana
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
I like to walk about amidst 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
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
George Santayana
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
George Santayana
In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.
George Santayana
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
George Santayana
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
George Santayana
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
George Santayana
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
George Santayana
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
George Santayana
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
George Santayana
It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
George Santayana
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George Santayana
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
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
George Santayana
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
George Santayana
Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
George Santayana
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
George Santayana
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
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
George Santayana
Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
George Santayana
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
George Santayana
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
George Santayana
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
George Santayana
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
George Santayana
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
George Santayana
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
George Santayana
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
George Santayana
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana – The Life of Reason (1905)
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness…. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana – The Life of Reason (1905)
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon, or to the first comer.
George Santayana
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
George Santayana
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to candor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper.
George Santayana
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.
George Santayana
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
George Santayana
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
George Santayana
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
George Santayana
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.
George Santayana
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
George Santayana
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
George Santayana
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
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
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
The living have never shown me how to live.
George Santayana
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
George Santayana
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
George Santayana
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
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
George Santayana
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
George Santayana
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
George Santayana
The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
George Santayana
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.
George Santayana
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana
The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
George Santayana
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
George Santayana
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana – Dialogues in Limbo (1925)
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.
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
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
There is no God and Mary is His Mother.
George Santayana
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
George Santayana
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
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana – The Life of Reason (1905)
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
George Santayana
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
George Santayana
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life regardless of its contents.
George Santayana
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
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
George Santayana
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana – Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word, the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
George Santayana
What is more important in life than our bodies, or in the world than what we look like?
George Santayana
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
George Santayana
When omniscience was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness of human thought may console us for its imperfection.
George Santayana
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
