José Ortega y Gasset Short Quotes

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Primitive man is by definition tactile man.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

José Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

José Ortega y Gasset
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

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
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.

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

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

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

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

José Ortega y Gasset
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
I am I and my circumstance, and if I don't save it I don't save myself.

José Ortega y Gasset
Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

José Ortega y Gasset
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

José Ortega y Gasset
Nations are formed and are kept alive by the fact that they have a program for tomorrow.

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
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

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

José Ortega y Gasset