Jose Ortega y Gasset

Philosopher

1883-05-09 – 1955-10-18

Jose Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist who influenced 20th-century European thought. He is widely known for The Revolt of the Masses and for his perspectivist approach to philosophy. His work addressed modern society, culture, and politics.

Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
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We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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.
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The trend toward pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence- just art with no other pretenses.
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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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.
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As this is the simple truth-that to live is to feel oneself lost-he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.
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Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.
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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.
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-sat-isfied man.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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I am I plus my circumstances.
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Triumph cannot help being cruel.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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