Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

About Jose Ortega y Gasset:

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" which "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism (prior to Martin Heidegger's) and his realist historicism which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."
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When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what ...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine dis...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reas...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he sp...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is ...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

El hombre de cabeza clara mira de frente la vida, se hace cargo de que todo en ella es problemático y se siente perdido. Como vivir es sentirse perdido, el que lo acepta ya ha empezado a encontrarse.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Las gentes no suelen ponerse de acuerdo si no es en cosas un poco bellacas o un poco tontas.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

En general, el político es político precisamente porque es torpe.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to b...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

A poco que vivimos hemos palpado ya los confines de nuestra prisión. Treinta años cuando más tardamos en reconocer los límites dentro de los cuales van a moverse nuestras posibilidades. Tomamos posesión de lo real, que es como haber medido los m...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not ...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English...

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Author Bio

  • NameJose Ortega y Gasset
  • DescriptionSpanish liberal philosopher and essayist
  • BornMay 9, 1883
  • DiedOctober 18, 1955
  • CountrySpain
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Educationist; Writer