José Ortega y Gasset
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José Ortega y Gasset (1883-05-09 – 1955-10-18) was a Spanish philosopher.
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- Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove.
All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instil youthfulness into an ancient world.- "Art a Thing of No Consequence" in The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel [La deshumanización del Arte e Ideas sobre la novela] (1925)
- No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. Everything that today is done in public and in private — even in one's inner conscience — is provisional, the only exception being certain portions of certain sciences. He will be a wise man who puts no trust in all that is proclaimed, upheld, essayed, and lauded at the present day. All that will disappear as quickly as it came. All of it, from the mania for physical sports (the mania, not the sports themselves) to political violence; from "new art" to sun-baths at idiotic fashionable watering-places. Nothing of all that has any roots; it is all pure invention, in the bad sense of the word, which makes it equivalent to fickle caprice. It is not a creation based on the solid substratum of life; it is not a genuine impulse or need. In a word, from the point of view of life it is false.
We are in presence of the contradiction of a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary. There exists today no politician who feels the inevitableness of his policy, and the more extreme his attitudes, the more frivolous, the less inspired by destiny they are. The only life with its roots fixed in earth, the only autochthonous life, is that which is made of inevitable acts. All the rest, all that it is in our power to take or to leave or to exchange for something else, is mere falsification of life. Life today is the fruit of an interregnum, of an empty space between two organizations of historical rule — that which was, that which is to be. For this reason it is essentially provisional. Men do not know what institutions to serve in truth; women do not know what type of men they in truth prefer.
The European cannot live unless embarked upon some great unifying enterprise. When this is lacking, he becomes degraded, grows slack, his soul is paralyzed. We have a commencement of this before our eyes today. The groups which up to today have been known as nations arrived about a century ago at their highest point of expansion. Nothing more can be done with them except lead them to a higher evolution. They are now mere past accumulating all around Europe, weighing it down, imprisoning it. With more vital freedom than ever, we feel that we cannot breathe the air within our nations, because it is confined air. What was before a nation open to all the winds of heaven, has turned into something provincial, an enclosing space.- The Revolt of the Masses [La rebelión de las masas] (1929)
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- A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
- An "unemployed" existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
- Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
- Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
- Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
- Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
- In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
- Law is born from despair of human nature.
- Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
- Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
- Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
- Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
- 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.
- Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
- Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
- The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
- The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
- The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
- There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
- To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
- To live is to feel oneself lost.
- Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
- We cannot put off living until we are ready.
- 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.
- We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
- We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
- Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised [sic] world.
