Quote

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jose Ortega y Gasset
Age: 72 †
Born: 1883
Born: May 9
Died: 1955
Died: October 18
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mathematician
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Sociologist
Translator
University Teacher
Madrid
Spain
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Men
Abasement
Life
Aggravation
Degradation
Refused
Frustration
Manner
Duty
Simply

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Image
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset