Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

Triumph cannot help being cruel.

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

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

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

The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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

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.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.

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

Law is born from despair of human nature.

Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same token we rarely think of them.... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties--of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit--be passed in review.

To wonder is to begin to understand.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

"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.

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

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.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

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?

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.

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

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

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

To live is to feel oneself lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.

Life is fired at us point blank.