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
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.
This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. ... In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. ...[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.
Life is fired at us point blank.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
History is the science of people.
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, bu
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.