George Santayana: Quotes about nature

George Santayana was 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism. Explore interesting quotes on nature.
George Santayana: 218 quotes8 likes

“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

“Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.”

George Santayana

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 251
Other works

“Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being.”

George Santayana

John Herman Randall, "The Nature of Naturalism", epilogue to Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944)
Misattributed

“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 book The Sense of Beauty

Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270
The Sense of Beauty (1896)

“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

“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

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. V, Reason in Science, Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

“[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.”

George Santayana

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense