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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

— George Santayana The Sense of Beauty (1896)

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Beauty

More quotes by George Santayana

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The Sense of Beauty (1896)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Santayana (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.