Jose Ortega y Gasset

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

— 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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Persistent ill-humour is all too clear an indication that someone is living contrary to his[her] intended purpose.”

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our…

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— Jose 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.…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“This vivid consciousness of not being able to be or to do but one thing at a time purifies our demands of…

— 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic…

— José Ortega y Gasset

We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts,…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote.…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

— Jose 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…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the measure of a man’s love…

— José Ortega y Gasset

Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody…

— Jose Ortega y Gasset