Top 100 Jose Ortega Y Gasset Quotes
#2. There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#3. I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#5. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being , and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#8. The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#9. The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#10. That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#12. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#14. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#16. I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#17. Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#18. The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#19. Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#20. just because of its promise of unlimited possibilities technology is an empty form like the most formalistic logic and is unable to determine the content of life.that is why our time,being the most intensely technical,is also the emptiest in all human history.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#21. When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#22. Tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#23. Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#24. With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#25. If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#26. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#28. Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#30. Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#31. The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#33. The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#35. The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#37. Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#39. Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#41. By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#42. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#44. Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#45. The poet begins where the man ends.
The man's lot is to live his human life,
the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#47. To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#48. From my point of view it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#49. The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#51. The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence..
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#52. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#53. Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#54. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, 'here and now,' without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#57. A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#58. The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#60. One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#61. In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#62. Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#63. The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#64. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always,
whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme
that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to
be such when it ceases to be aristocratic
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#66. I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#67. "Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#69. Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#70. Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#71. Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#72. We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#74. The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#75. Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#76. There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#78. In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#79. This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#80. The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, bu
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#81. Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#82. ... falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#84. [ ... ] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#85. Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love" ... is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#86. The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-sat-isfied man.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#87. Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#88. Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the measure of a man's love lies in how stupid he has become or is willing to be.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#89. There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#90. The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#91. Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#92. [I]t would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of to-day of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#94. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#95. Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#96. Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#97. I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#99. We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#100. The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
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