Philosopher and poet George Santayana was born in Madrid (1863). He was the man who coined the famous phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana's father was Spanish and his mother was Scottish. He spent almost his entire life in the United States, though he never wanted to become a citizen. For many years he taught philosophy at Harvard, and his students included T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.
Santayana wrote a great deal about art and the importance of creative thinking. He once said, "Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you." As he grew older, he became tired of teaching and what he called the "thistles of trivial and narrow scholarship," so he left Harvard and spent the rest of his life writing. His books include many philosophical works, as well as collections of poetry. He also spent about 20 years working on a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), about a young man's struggles in Boston high society just before World War I.
He said, "The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than the logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise."
And, "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
Sonnet III
O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
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*A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
*A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
*Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
*America is a young country with an old mentality.
*Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
*Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
*Sanity is a madness put to good use.
*Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
*Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
*The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
*The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
*Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
*To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
*To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
*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.
*Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
*The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
*Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
*Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
*An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
*Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
*The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
*There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
*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. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
*Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
*For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
*Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
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