Gasset Quotes & Sayings

Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities. — 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

A concrete example of this mechanism is found in one of the most alarming phenomena of the last thirty years: the enormous increase in the police force of all countries. The increase of population has inevitably rendered it necessary. However accustomed we may be to it, the terrible paradox should not escape our minds that the population of a great modern city, in order to move about peaceably and attend to its business, necessarily requires a police force to regulate the circulation. But it is foolishness for the party of "law and order" to imagine that these "forces of public authority" created to preserve order are always going to be content to preserve the order that that party desires. Inevitably they will end by themselves defining and deciding on the order they are going to impose- which, naturally, will be that which suits them best. — 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

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

When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties. — 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

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

Every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own ... — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism. The individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. — 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

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

The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned , for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line. — 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

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

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted. — 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

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas. — 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

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

He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge. — 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

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

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

The few individuals who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. — Ortega Y Gasset, Jose

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

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Because man's being is made of strange stuff.... — Ortega Y Gasset, Jose

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

Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide. — 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

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

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving. — 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 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

[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported ... Civilization is not "just here," it is not self-supporting. — 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

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In — John Williams

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

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

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

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

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

To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity. — 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

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

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. — 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

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role? — 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

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

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

The existence of language is, in a way, a continual denigration of words. — 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

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

I am myself and my circumstance. I live therefore I think. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Triumph cannot help being cruel. — 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

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

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

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

But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality? — Ortega Y Gasset

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period. — 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

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

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be. — 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

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition. — 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