What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said,… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of… — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
“For there is no doubt that the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits into two classes… — José Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility. — Jose Ortega y Gasset Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
