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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

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
Everything
Good
Grain
Salt
Lies
Taking
Humor
Wisdom
Lying

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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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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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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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