Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time

Da grima escuchar las inepcias que a toda hora se dicen.

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality... the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Sólo cabe progresar cuando se piensa en grande, sólo es posible avanzar cuando se mira lejos.

The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties.

Fue siempre Madrid predilecta y víctima de la burocracia.

The existence of language is, in a way, a continual denigration of words.

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.

Yo siento mucho no coincidir con el pacifismo contemporáneo en su antipatía hacia la fuerza; sin ella no habría habido nada de lo que más nos importa en el pasado, y si la excluimos del porvenir sólo podremos imaginar una humanidad caótica. Pero también es cierto que con sólo la fuerza no se ha hecho nunca cosa que merezca la pena.

Más de una vez me he entretenido imaginando qué habría acontecido si, en lugar de hombres de Castilla, hubieran sido encargados, mil años hace, los "unitarios" de ahora, catalanes y vascos, de formar esta enorme cosa que llamamos España. Yo sospecho que, aplicando sus métodos y dando con sus testas en el yunque, lejos de arribar a la España una, habrían dejado la Península convertida en una pululación de mil cantones.

Pasiunea e o stare patologic? ce presupune imperfec?iunea unui suflet.

Desde el siglo XVI ha entrado la humanidad toda en un proceso gigantesco de unificación, que en nuestros días ha llegado a su término insuperable.

El símbolo entrega su secreto enorme cuando lo tomamos al pie de la letra y sin alterarlo lo trasportamos al resto de la realidad

La universidad ha arruinado desde hace generaciones la vitalidad del pensamiento y queda ya solo su momia y su esqueleto, como algo que se enseña de tal hora a tal hora. Pensar es otra cosa. Es terror, entusiasmo, desazón, curiosidad, profunda delicia, exaltación... es lo qu ese produce cuando el vivir se estira, se acrece y siendo vivir es más que vivir Ortega y Gasset A la Biografia de Jordi Gracia

El joven no necesita razones para vivir; sólo necesita pretextos

nuestra vida es en todo instante y antes que nada conciencia de lo que nos es posible

This vivid consciousness of not being able to be or to do but one thing at a time purifies our demands of what that thing shall be. We then feel a repugnance for that juvenile narcissism which does no matter what, precisely because it doesn't matter what, and which nevertheless believes in its vanity that it is doing something.

Dijalog je rodio ?utanje.

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits 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, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere boys that float on the waves.

If you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization—you are done.

Once for all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere