José Ortega y Gasset quotes - page 4

The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. (José Ortega y Gasset)
To-day the [Enlightenment] ideal has been changed into a reality; not only in legislation, which is the mere framework of public life, but in the heart of every individual, whatever his ideas may be, and even if he be a reactionary in his ideas, that is to say, even when he attacks and castigates institutions by which those rights are sanctioned. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Life today is the fruit of an interregnum, of an empty space between two organizations of historical rule - that which was, that which is to be. For this reason it is essentially provisional. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
To remain in the past means to be dead. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
The city is not built, as is the cottage or the domus, to shelter from the weather and to propagate the species - these are personal, family concerns - but in order to discuss public affairs. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
With more vital freedom than ever, we feel that we cannot breathe the air within our nations, because it is confined air. What was before a nation open to all the winds of heaven, has turned into something provincial, an enclosing space. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
We are in presence of the contradiction of a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. (José Ortega y Gasset)
Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
The State is always, whatever be its form - primitive, ancient, medieval, modern - an invitation issued by one group of men to other human groups to carry out some enterprise in common. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be. The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us. In this matter we only possess a negative freedom of will, a noluntas. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great. (José Ortega y Gasset)
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
To live is to feel oneself lost. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset