George Santayana - Nature Quotes

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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

George Santayana
Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

George Santayana
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

George Santayana
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

George Santayana
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

George Santayana
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

George Santayana
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.

George Santayana
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

George Santayana
Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

George Santayana
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

George Santayana
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else

George Santayana
And the animate world must needs concern the physicist, since it is the crown of nature, the focus where matter concentrates its fires and best shows what it is capable of doing.

George Santayana
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?

George Santayana