José Ortega y Gasset Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

José Ortega y Gasset
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence, and in its style one can see reflected the capacities of a race.

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
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
Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.

José Ortega y Gasset
The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilization. Not of this or that civilization but — from what we can judge today — of any civilization. … The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilized world.

José Ortega y Gasset
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
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
A society without an aristocracy, without an elite minority, is not a society.

José Ortega y Gasset
Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world

José Ortega y Gasset
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

José Ortega y Gasset
The Mediterraneans, who do not think clearly, do see clearly.

José Ortega y Gasset
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
The primary meaning of the words "modern," "modernity," with which recent times have baptised themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of "the height of time" which I am at present analysing. "Modern" is what is "in the fashion, "that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word "modern" then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative call to be at the height of one's time. For the "modern" man, not to be "modern" means to fall below the historic level.

José Ortega y Gasset
Minorities are individuals or groups of individuals especially qualified. The masses are the collection of people not specially qualified.

José Ortega y Gasset
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
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

José Ortega y Gasset
Europe is really a swarm: many bees on a single course.

José Ortega y Gasset
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

José Ortega y Gasset
Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

José Ortega y Gasset
I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

José Ortega y Gasset
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?"

José Ortega y Gasset