Jose Ortega Y Gasset quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Jose Ortega Y Gasset Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jose Ortega Y Gasset on Wise Famous Quotes.

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love" ... is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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.

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.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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.

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

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

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

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

The real magic wand is the child's own mind.

The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.

Man is a fugitive from nature.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

To remain in the past means to be dead.

All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.

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

Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.

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

I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

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

Triumph cannot help being cruel.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but ... what we ought to avoid.

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

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.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

[ ... ] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

In a way the philosopher and the barber are of the same guild; the barber cuts hair and the philosopher splits hairs.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

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

To wonder is to begin to understand.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Love is exclusivity, selection.

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

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Liberalism ... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.

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

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

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

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

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

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

History is the science of people.

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.

To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.

Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.

I am myself and my circumstance. I live therefore I think.

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

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.

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

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Man in a word has no nature; what he has..is history.

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

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.

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

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.

From my point of view it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.

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

We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

Tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

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

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

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

The will to be oneself is heroism

I am me and my circumstance

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

I am I plus my circumstances.

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.