Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

• The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

  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

• There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• A Don Juan is not a man who loves women, but a man that women love.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a pretty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Conviction

• The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

  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

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

  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 be.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Frustration, Duty

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

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

Jose Ortega y Gasset (55)

Birth:	9th May, 1883
Death:	18th October, 1955
Nationality:	Spanish
Profession:	Essayist, Philosopher

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