Jose Ortega Y Gasset Quotes & Sayings

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. — 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

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

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

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress. — 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

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

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things. — 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

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

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something ("possession" meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is eternally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I actually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love ... is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become part of it. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

I am me and my circumstance — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself. — 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

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

"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

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Law is born from despair of human nature. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the rigorous quality of its assumptions. But experimental science wins these admirable qualities at the cost of maintaining itself on a plane of secondary problems and leaving the decisive and ultimate questions intact. Out of this renunciation it makes its essential virtue, and for this, if for nothing else, it deserves applause. But experimental science is only a meager portion of the mind and the organism. Where it stops, man does not stop. If the physicist stays the hand with which he delineates things at the point where his methods end, the human being who stands behind every physicist prolongs the line and carries it on to the end, just as our eye, seeing a portion of a broken arch, automatically completes the missing airy curve. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

To live is to feel oneself lost. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

[ ... ] 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

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

[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The will to be oneself is heroism — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The combinations of these two elements, enchantment and surrender, is, then, essential to the love which we are discussing ... What exists in love is surrender due to enchantment. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice. — 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

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

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-sat-isfied man. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

The real magic wand is the child's own mind. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal. — 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

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

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world . — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

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

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

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 characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet - to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude - and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone - cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

[L]ife, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama ... [T]he primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

Although all those who fall in love do so in the same way, not all fall in love for the same reason. There is no single quality which is universally loved. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

In order to be enchanted we must be, above all, capable of seeing another person - simply opening one's eyes will not do. — 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

So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits - as Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did - but for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

To wonder is to begin to understand. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great. — 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

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. — 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

Man,then, rather than by what he he is,or by what he has,escapes the zooological scale by what he does,by his conduct.hence it is that he must always keep watch on himself. — 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

The mass is all which sets no value on itself--good or ill--based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everything" ... The mass crushes beneath it everything which is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

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

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