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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

George Santayana

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George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Thinking
Madness
Thinks
Normal
Nation
Imbecility
Passion
Requisite
Nations
Calls
Less
Folly
Every
Fancy

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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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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 condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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