Quote

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

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
Beauty
Tendency
Values
Faculty
Nature
Account
Must
Tendencies
Conspicuous
Mind
Radical
Widespread
Accounts
Adequate
Value
Observe
Principles
Passes

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
Image
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
Image
Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
George Santayana
Image
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
Image
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
George Santayana
Image
Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
Image
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
Image
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana
Image
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
Image
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana
Image
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
Image
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
Image
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
George Santayana
Image
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
Image
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
George Santayana
Image
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
Image
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
Image
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
George Santayana