José Ortega y Gasset Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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

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

José Ortega y Gasset
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
I am a Spaniard, that is to say, a man without imagination.

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
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
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

José Ortega y Gasset
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

José Ortega y Gasset
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

José Ortega y Gasset
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
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?

José Ortega y Gasset
Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

José Ortega y Gasset
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

José Ortega y Gasset
I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.

José Ortega y Gasset
A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

José Ortega y Gasset
The State is always, whatever be its form — primitive, ancient, medieval, modern — an invitation issued by one group of men to other human groups to carry out some enterprise in common. That enterprise, be its intermediate processes what they may, consists in the long run in the organisation of a certain type of common life. … [As Renan says,] "To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people.… In the past, an inheritance of glories and regrets; in the future, one and the same programme to carry out.… The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite."

José Ortega y Gasset
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
Primitive man is by definition tactile man.

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
A society without an aristocracy, without an elite minority, is not a society.

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

José Ortega y Gasset