Jose Ortega y Gasset quotes:

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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.
Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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.
Law is born from despair of human nature.
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.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
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.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Life is a series of collisions with the future.
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.
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.
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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.
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.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
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.
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?
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?
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.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
[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.
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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.
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.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
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.
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
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.
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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.'
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
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.
I am I plus my circumstances.
[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge to-day of any civilisation. ...[T]he type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.
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
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be
Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.
[...] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.
... 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...
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.
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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.
"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.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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.
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
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.
The real magic wand is the child's own mind.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
To wonder is to begin to understand.
The will to be oneself is heroism
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.
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Man is a fugitive from nature.
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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.
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
[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.
When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.
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
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
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.
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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 .
Life is fired at us point blank.
This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. ... In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. ...[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.
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.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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.
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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.
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
Man in a word has no nature; what he has. ..is history.
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.
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.
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.
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.
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.
The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

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