Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

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.

The will to be oneself is heroism

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

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

When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being "Paleolithic."

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.

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

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.

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

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

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

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.

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

Love is exclusivity, selection.

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

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

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

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

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

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.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

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

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.