Jose Ortega y. Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish critic, journalist, and philosopher. He greatly influenced the cultural and literary renaissance of Spain in the 20th century.
Born in Madrid, Ortega studied at Madrid University (1898–1904) and was a professor from 1911. He also lived in South America and Portugal (1931–46.) Meditaciones del Quijote (1914; Meditations on Quixote, 1961) outlines national symbols in Spanish literature and compares them with others. In El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923, ‘Modern Theme,’) he argues that great philosophies demarcate their epochs’ cultural horizons.
Ortega’s best-known work, La rebelión de las masas (1930; The Revolt of the Masses, 1932,) foreshadowed the Spanish Civil War. Often mistakenly taken as a right-wing and elitist document, it is a masterly analysis of the 20th-century situation in which the masses have revolted against minorities. He corrected any possible ambiguities inherent in this book in his posthumous El hombre y la gente (1957; Man and People, 1957.)
Ortega introduced Marcel Proust and James Joyce to Spain, and his writing has radically influenced the majority of Spanish writers of his time and after him.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jose Ortega y. Gasset
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, “here and now” without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: The Present, Living
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Effort
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Power, Civilization
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: People
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Creativity
Minorities are individual or groups of individuals especially qualified. The masses are the collection of people not specially qualified.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Poetry
This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Life, Living
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Perception, Exaggeration
I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Life, Living
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Youth
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Understanding
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Being Ourselves
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Losing, Loss, Losers
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Liberalism
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Discontent
A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
Life means to have something definite to do—a mission to fulfill—and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Life
There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Books
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Little Things, Things
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.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Living, Change, Life
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties, Adversity
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
Topics: Cynicism
Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset
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