„La musica è essenzialmente inutile, come la vita.“
— George Santayana
da The Life of Reason, 1905
Data di nascita: 16. Dicembre 1863
Data di morte: 26. Settembre 1952
George Santayana, nato Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás , è stato un filosofo, scrittore, poeta e saggista spagnolo, rappresentante del cosiddetto realismo critico.
— George Santayana
da The Life of Reason, 1905
— George Santayana
da La vita della ragione
— George Santayana
da Soliliquies in England, 1924
— George Santayana
da The Life of Reason, 1905; citato in David Allen, Detto, Fatto!, Sperling & Kupfer, 2006, pag. 66. ISBN 9788820041090
— George Santayana
da Introduzione all'Etica di Spinoza; citato in Elena Spagnol, Citazioni, Garzanti, 2003
— George Santayana
da Interpretazioni di poesia e religione; citato in MicroMega. Per una riscossa laica, 2007, p. 98
— George Santayana
da Introduzione all'Etica di Spinoza
— George Santayana, The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
— George Santayana
Context: 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.
Ch. 2 "History"
— George Santayana
Context: Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
p. 64
— George Santayana
Context: 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.
Ch. 2 "History"