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
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.
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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.
Life is a series of collisions with the future.
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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.
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
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.
Life is fired at us point blank.
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.