Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a pretty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Conviction

• 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.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the cafe.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• 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.

  Jose 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.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• 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.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Tags in Revolution

• Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Tags in Revolution

• The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

Jose Ortega y Gasset (55)

Birth:	9th May, 1883
Death:	18th October, 1955
Nationality:	Spanish
Profession:	Essayist, Philosopher

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