George Santayana Quotes on Happiness
George Santayana’s five-volume The Life of Reason (1905–06) gives early twentieth-century American naturalism its most comprehensive treatment of happiness as the harmonious activity of the rational soul ordering its passions in light of the good. The principal claim is that happiness is not a separable feeling state but the natural perfection that accompanies a life well lived under the conditions a finite embodied human nature actually faces — and the corresponding analysis develops the harmonization of common sense, society, religion, art, and science as the parts of the rational life. The framework integrates the Aristotelian and Spinozistic traditions with the materialist naturalism of Santayana’s broader Realms of Being, and the cool philosophical detachment that distinguishes his voice from his American pragmatist contemporaries.
Quotes
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“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
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Attributed to George Santayana:
“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”
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“Pt. III, Form; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasure.", p. 125”
On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws , fixed and external objects, principles , persons , and gods , are so many symbolic , algebraic expressions. They stand for experience ; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct -
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
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