George Santayana Art Quotations

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

Art is a delayed echo.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

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.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

The earth has music for those who listen.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things...

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

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .