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José Ortega y Gasset Quotes (1883-1955)
Philosopher
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About José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset (May 9 1883 – October 18 1955) was a Spanish philosopher.
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“Life is fired at us point blank.”
“Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.”
“Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.”
“Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.”
“That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them”
“Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.”
“When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?”
“Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.”
“Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which … can be called “public” or “popular” opinion.”
“In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.”
“Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. We are faced with a condition, strange but inexorable, involved in our very existence.”
“[I]t would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of to-day of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.”
“The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?”
“The demagogues, impresarios of alteracion, who have already caused the death of several civilizations, harass men so that they shall not reflect, see to it that they are kept herded together in crowds so that they cannot reconstruct their individuality in the one place where it can be reconstructed, which is in solitude.”
“What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.”
“The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. … An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility”
“[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation. …[T]he type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.”
“That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.”
“Man does not exercise his thought because he finds it amusing, but because, obliged as he is to live immersed in the world and to force his way among things, he finds himself under the necessity of organizing his psychic activities, which are not very different from those of the anthropoid, in the form of thought — which is what the animal does not do.”
“Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. … Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.”
“Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, “We have a genius for what we like.” Genius, man’s superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.”
José Ortega y Gasset Quotes by Topic
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José Ortega y Gasset on Masses 5 quotes
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Herd mentality 3 quotes
“The mass is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Individualism 2 quotes
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Self-esteem 2 quotes
“The mass is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Conformity 2 quotes
“The mass is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Magic (supernatural) 2 quotes
“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.”
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José Ortega y Gasset on History
José Ortega y Gasset on Man
José Ortega y Gasset on Democracy
“Today we are witnessing the triumph of a hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Intellectual responsibility
“The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who "did not care to give reasons or even to be right", but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions.”
José Ortega y Gasset on Excellence
José Ortega y Gasset on Metaphors
“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 [and left behind] inside one of His creatures when He made him.”
What José Ortega y Gasset Said About Others
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José Ortega y Gasset on Diogenes of Sinope
“Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo — or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?”
Quotes About José Ortega y Gasset
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Eric Hoffer on José Ortega y Gasset
“Ortega y Gasset is of the opinion that the inability of a country to produce a genuine mass movement indicates some ethnological defect. He says of his own Spain that its "ethnological intelligence has always been an atrophied function and has never had a normal development."”
About José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset (May 9 1883 – October 18 1955) was a Spanish philosopher.