Top 172 Quotes & Sayings by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
I am I plus my circumstances.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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 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.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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.
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.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
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.
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Law is born from despair of human nature.
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.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
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.
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.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
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.
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
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.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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.
With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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.
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.
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
To wonder is to begin to understand.
The real magic wand is the child's own mind.
Life is fired at us point blank.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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.
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 past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
The will to be oneself is heroism
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