José Ortega y Gasset Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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
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
I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.

José Ortega y Gasset
The masses feel that it is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

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

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

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
I am a Spaniard, that is to say, a man without imagination.

José Ortega y Gasset
An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

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
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
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

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

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

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

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
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
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
I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
It 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
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
That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them

José Ortega y Gasset
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
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
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

José Ortega y Gasset
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.

José Ortega y Gasset
I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

José Ortega y Gasset