Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás – better known as George Santayana – was born in Madrid in 1863 and died in Rome in 1952 at the age of 88.
He was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and considered himself American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport.
Some of the sayings of George Santayana are famous without people actually knowing who he was.
Although he was born in Spain he wrote in English and taught at Harvard. However, at the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position there and returned to Europe, He never returned to the United States.
Santayana, like many philosophers, denied the existence of supernatural beings, like gods and ghosts, but he found profound meaning in literary writings and in religious ideas and texts.
Santayana was an agnostic but he held a fairly benign view of religion and described himself as an “aesthetic Catholic”.
The sayings selected by our LifeDaily team provide an insight into the mind of George Santayana:
- Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
- History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.
- Nonsense is when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
- Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
- Depression is rage spread thin.
- A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
- Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
- Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- Sanity is madness put to good use.
- 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.
- Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
- Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
- Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
- Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Did these sayings help you to understand George Santayana better?
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