110+ Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes (Philosophical, Existential And Insightful)

Jose Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist who was born in Madrid in 1883. He is best known for his book The Revolt of the Masses, which argued that modern society was being undermined by the emergence of a mass culture. He is considered one of the most influential Spanish thinkers of the twentieth century.

Top 10 Jose Ortega Y Gasset Quotes

1. We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
2. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
3. Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
4. Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
5. Life is a series of collisions with the future.
6. To wonder is to begin to understand.
7. Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
8. Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
9. An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
10. Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset Short Quotes

• Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
• There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
• Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
• Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
• Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
• Love is exclusivity, selection.
• History is the science of people.
• The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
• The real magic wand is the child's own mind.
• The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

Jose Ortega y Gasset Famous Quotes And Sayings

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

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

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.' — Jose Ortega y Gasset

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

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

Liberalism -- it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today 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

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

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one — Jose Ortega y Gasset

When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being "Paleolithic." — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Man is a fugitive from nature. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat? — Jose Ortega y Gasset

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man." — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

"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

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

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

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

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is fired at us point blank. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. 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. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called "public" or "popular" opinion. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

It is not obligatory for a generation to have great men. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility — Jose Ortega y Gasset

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

I am I plus my circumstances. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Triumph cannot help being cruel. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity... — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life Lessons by Jose Ortega y Gasset

1. Jose Ortega y Gasset believed that life should be lived with passion and vigor, and that each individual should strive to find their own unique purpose.
2. He taught that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that it is important to be open to new experiences and ideas.
3. He also encouraged people to be mindful of their actions, and to take responsibility for their choices and decisions.