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
These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Life is a series of collisions with the future.
Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
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 trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence..
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.