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Named source · 1896

The Sense of Beauty Quotes by George Santayana: Context & Meanings

2 quotations linked to The Sense of Beauty by or associated with George Santayana, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

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1896 philosophical treatise on aesthetics

Topics and ideas

Beauty, pleasure, perception, form, expression, association, imagination, art and the role of the observer in aesthetic experience.

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2 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1
“Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”

Santayana defines beauty as pleasure experienced as though it belonged to the perceived object, making aesthetic value depend on an appreciative response rather than a detached physical property.

Source note: The Sense of Beauty, Part I, §11, “The definition of beauty,” Project Gutenberg #26842. This is Santayana’s historical aesthetic theory of objectified pleasure, not a modern empirical test for whether an object is objectively beautiful.

Source identified2
“The expressiveness of everything accordingly increases with the intelligence of the observer.”

Santayana argues that expression depends partly on what an observer can associate with an object, so richer knowledge and imagination can reveal more possible meanings without guaranteeing that every interpretation is equally justified.

Source note: The Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §48, “Expression defined,” Project Gutenberg #26842. The sentence follows Santayana’s account of expression as suggestion supplied partly by the observer’s stored ideas and associations.