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José Ortega y Gasset
77 quotes
“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mission of the University [Misión de la Universidad (PDF)] (1930; translation © 1944, first published 1946), p. 73 [p. 15 in Spanish PDF], translated by Howard Lee Nostrand.
“Life is fired at us point blank.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Man and People [El hombre y la gente] (1957), p. 42, translated by Willard R. Trask.
“Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2010), p. 223
“It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, apparently, many men are again feeling homesick for the herd. They devote themselves passionately to whatever there is left in them of the sheep. They want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool, and the head down. This is the reason why so many European peoples are looking for a shepherd and a sheep dog.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. 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 (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. 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 be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better."… From A.D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still"? Horace, Odes, III.6]”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I often asked myself the following question. There is no doubt that at all times for many men one of the greatest tortures of their lives has been the contact, the collision with the folly of their neighbours. And yet how is it that there has never been attempted — I think this is so — a study on this matter, an Essay on Folly? For the pages of Erasmus do not treat of this aspect of the matter.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism. And let us not deceive ourselves, this is what is beginning to appear in Europe under the progressive rebellion of the masses. The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that territory there are no ruling principles to which it is possible to appeal. Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]ife, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. … [T]he primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth — that to live is to feel oneself lost — he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it — and this is what almost all historians have believed — is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. …[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. … In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. …[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History tells us of innumerable retrogressions, of decadences and degenerations. But nothing tells us that there is no possibility of much more basic retrogressions than any so far known, including the most radical of all: the total disappearance of man as man and his silent return to the animal scale, to complete and definitive alteration. The fate of culture, the destiny of man, depends upon our maintaining this dramatic consciousness ever alive in our inmost being, and upon our being well aware, as of a murmuring counterpoint in our entrails, that we can only be sure of insecurity.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Torn in this way from its normal connection with contemplation, with being within one's self, pure action permits and produces only a chain of stupidities which we might better call "stupidity unchained." So we see today that an absurd attitude justifies the appearance of an opposing attitude no more reasonable; at least, reasonable enough, and so on indefinitely. Such is the extreme to which political affairs in the West have come!”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without a strategic retreat into the self, without vigilant thought, human life is impossible. Call to mind all that mankind owes to certain great withdrawals into the self! It is no chance that all the great founders of religions preceded their apostolates by famous retreats. Buddha withdraws to the forest; Mahomet withdraws to his tent, and even there he withdraws from his tent by wrapping his head in his cloak; above all, Jesus goes apart into the desert for forty days.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1883–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source