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
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
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.
Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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.
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.
All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.