Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes - Page 4

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

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

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

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

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge today of any civilisation. The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.

Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

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

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

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.

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.

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

Love is exclusivity, selection.

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

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