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
In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Love is exclusivity, selection.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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 poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.