Quote

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.

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
Wonderful
Amusement
Universe
Engines
Spirit
Observe
Life
Magnificent
World
Immense
Terror
Dramatize
Filled
Conceive
Wonder
Engine

More quotes by 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
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Image
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George Santayana
Image
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
Image
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
George Santayana
Image
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
George Santayana
Image
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
Image
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
Image
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
Image
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Image
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
Image
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
George Santayana
Image
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
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
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
George Santayana
Image
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
Image
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
George Santayana