José Ortega y Gasset - History As a System (1941)

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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 nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. … An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility

José Ortega y Gasset
Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

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

José Ortega y Gasset
Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. … Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

José Ortega y Gasset
In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

José Ortega y Gasset
The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.

José Ortega y Gasset
The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?

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

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
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.

José Ortega y Gasset