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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

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

More quotes by George Santayana

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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
George Santayana
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
George Santayana
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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
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
George Santayana
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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
George Santayana
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana
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Fear first created the gods.
George Santayana
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
George Santayana
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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
George Santayana
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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
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
George Santayana