José Ortega y Gasset quotes - page 5

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist, regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in twentieth-century Spain. His works explored themes such as mass society, the role of the individual, and the crisis of modernity. He shaped intellectual discourse in Spain and Europe through his writings and lectures. Here are 126 of his quotes:

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

José Ortega y Gasset

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

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.

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

José Ortega y Gasset

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

José Ortega y Gasset

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

José Ortega y Gasset

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

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. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

José Ortega y Gasset

He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. 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.

José Ortega y Gasset

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.

José Ortega y Gasset

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

José Ortega y Gasset

This grave dissociation of past and present is the generic fact of our time and the cause of the suspicion, more or less vague, which gives rise to the confusion characteristic of our present-day existence. We feel that we actual men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us. Any remains of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Models, norms, standards are no use to us. We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, in full actuality, be they problems of art, science, or politics. The European stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side; like Peter Schlehmil he has lost his shadow. This is what always happens when midday comes.

José Ortega y Gasset

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. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.

José Ortega y Gasset

It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, to-day he is more clever, has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period. But that capacity is of no use to him; in reality, the vague feeling that he possesses it seems only to shut him up more within himself and keep him from using it. Once for all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere.... 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. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his "opinions."

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. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.

José Ortega y Gasset