Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an…

— 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its…

— Jose 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation.…

— Jose 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain,…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The…

— José Ortega y Gasset

“The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre,…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset