Quotes by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Spanish writer and philosopher

Lived from: 1883 - 1955

Category: Philosophers | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagSpain

Born: 9 may 1883 Died: 18 october 1955

  • 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.
  • 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.

Quotes 1 till 20 of 34.

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  • 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.
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  • Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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  • Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
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  • The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
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  • A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
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  • An ''unemployed'' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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  • An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
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  • 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.
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  • Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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  • Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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  • Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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  • For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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  • I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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  • I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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  • In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
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  • Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.
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  • 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.
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  • Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
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  • Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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  • 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.
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