Quote

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

George Santayana

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Unaccountably
Formed
Obviously
Taste
Beauty
Beautiful
Things

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
Image
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
George Santayana
Image
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
Image
It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
George Santayana
Image
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
Image
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Image
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
Image
There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
George Santayana
Image
Columbus gave the world another world.
George Santayana
Image
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
George Santayana
Image
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
Image
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
Image
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George Santayana
Image
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
George Santayana
Image
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
Image
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
George Santayana
Image
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana