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José Ortega Y Gasset Quotes

José Ortega Y Gasset quote from classy quote

On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Culture Dehumanization Existence Life Meaning Philosophy Service Thought Worth

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Comprehension Knowledge Mechanics Philosophy Physics Science Technique

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Life Success Survival Thinking

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Division Of Labor Science Specialization The Masses

The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Beauty Love Marble Psychology Vitality

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Characteristics Love Nature Soul

Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of the mad woman of the house. And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call justice and the other thing that we call happiness?

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Existentialism Fantasy Happiness History Man Philosophy Reason

Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. Consciousness cannot go behind itself. Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the meaning it has in the original source of all meaning: life.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Consciousness Life Meaning Mind Philosophy Psychology Thought

Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Culmination Life Passion

When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Concord Parties Passion Society

... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own...

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Construction Hypothesis Ideas Imagination Reality Theory

To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, “through seas that keel has never cut before.” If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Archipelagoes Camoëns Landscapes Meditation Navigation Perseverance Philosophy Problems Sailing Shores

Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Creation Imagination Instinct Sexuality

…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Consciousness Love Misery

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Attention Eyes Intellectual Marvelous Mindfulness Seeing Strange Understanding Wonder

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Discontent Existentialism Happiness Man Mankind Philosophy Value Values

I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Philosophy Of Life

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude—and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone—cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Intellectual Philosophy Solitude Truth

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Interests Personality Values

The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...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. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Noble Life Service The Masses Transcendence

Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Bull Pen Risk Write

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Confrontation Equilibrium Existentialism History Humanity Life Philosophy Toynbee Zoology

Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the measure of a man’s love lies in how stupid he has become or is willing to be.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Love Stupidity

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Bolhevism Marxism Socialism

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

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Creating Positive Change

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Patriotism Nationalism

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Self Acceptance

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Nature Love Is Human

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Me Attention You

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

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Good Man Landscape

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

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Life Existence Worse

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

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Youth Living Reasons

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Fall Escape See

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Small Things Small Person

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Truth Idea Putting

I am I plus my circumstances.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset I Am Circumstances Am

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Living Ready Off

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Future Life Is A Sum

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Adolescence Thus Preserved

Law is born from despair of human nature.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

José Ortega Y Gasset Nature Law Human Nature
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