Jose Ortega y Gasset
Jose Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gassetwas a Spanish liberal philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey...
NationalitySpanish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth9 May 1883
CountrySpain
Jose Ortega y Gasset quotes about
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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.
The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.