Jose Ortega Quotes
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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.
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'
Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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.
The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
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.
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.
The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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.
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
