Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

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Jose Ortega y Gasset

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : May 9, 1883

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

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 who wants to see things clearly.

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 we no longer have.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Jose Ortega y Gasset