To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Man of letters

Santayana's one novel The Last Puritan is a bildungsroman—that is a novel that centers on the personal growth of the protagonist. He had saved money and been aided by a legacy from his mother. While his writings on technical philosophy can be difficult his other writings are far more accessible and pithy.

At the age of forty-eight Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently never to return to the United States. ". He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where [he stood] in daily life.