Quote

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

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
Better
Ruin
Nowhere
Quick
Ruins
Architecture
Lovely
Promise
Seen
Gothic

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
Image
A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana
Image
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
George Santayana
Image
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
George Santayana
Image
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
Image
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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 knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
Image
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
Image
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
Image
I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
George Santayana
Image
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
George Santayana
Image
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
Image
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana
Image
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
Image
The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.
George Santayana
Image
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
George Santayana
Image
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
George Santayana
Image
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
George Santayana
Image
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana