Wit & Attitude Quote by George Santayana

Santayana’s line works because it weaponizes two bodily reflexes - weeping and laughing - as moral intelligence tests. It isn’t sentimental. It’s diagnostic. Youth without tears isn’t “strong”; it’s uninitiated. To have never wept is to have never been broken open by reality, never had the ego punctured by loss, humiliation, or awe. Santayana calls that state “savage” not to romanticize it, but to mark a kind of pre-civilized emotional illiteracy: a self sealed off from the human costs that bind a society together.

Then he flips the charge onto age. If youth needs sorrow to become human, adulthood needs comedy to remain human. The older man who “will not” laugh isn’t incapable; he’s refused. That choice signals rigidity: a mind so invested in dignity, grievance, or control that it can’t tolerate the lightness that keeps experience from calcifying into doctrine. Santayana, a philosopher suspicious of moral posturing, is pricking at the vanity of the perpetually serious.

The subtext is a theory of maturity that runs against macho stoicism and against the equally modern temptation to treat cynicism as wisdom. Crying is the price of admission to empathy; laughing is the maintenance fee for perspective. Coming from a thinker shaped by late-19th-century pessimism and early-20th-century upheaval, the quote reads like a survival tip: feel enough to be responsible when you’re young, and stay supple enough to be sane when you’re old.