Quote

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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
Miracles
Accidents
Complicated
Miracle
Understood
Causes
Propitious
Religion
Natural
Readily

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
George Santayana
Image
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
Image
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana
Image
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
Image
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
George Santayana
Image
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
Image
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
George Santayana
Image
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
George Santayana
Image
The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
George Santayana
Image
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
Image
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
George Santayana
Image
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
Image
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
Image
To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
George Santayana
Image
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Image
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
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
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
George Santayana
Image
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
George Santayana
Image
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana