Famous Quotes by José Ortega Y Gasset

  • Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and... More
  • Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be... More
  • I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes... More
  • Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not... More
  • The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache... More
  • Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life.... More
  • There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own... More
  • We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving. More
  • Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. More
  • Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because... More
  • By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them,... More
  • Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. More
  • Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity. More
  • Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt. More
  • Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only... More
  • The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to... More
  • Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors. More
  • Under equal conditions, the feminine psyche is closer to potential contraction than the... More
  • Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something... More
  • He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief... More
  • In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and... More
  • There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are... More
  • Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts. More
  • Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. More
  • The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace,... More
  • To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat. More
  • The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is... More
  • This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental... More
  • The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the... More
  • Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right... More
  • An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. More
  • Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of... More
  • Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio. More
  • We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know... More
  • Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of... More
  • An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. More
  • In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering... More
  • We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape... More
  • A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the... More
  • Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values. More
  • I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself. More
  • The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of... More
  • For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great. More

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