Quote

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

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
Wherever
Hour
Proclaim
Knowing
Corny
Rights
Impose
Hours
Characteristic
Mind
Commonplace
Assurance
Characteristics

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Image
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The will to be oneself is heroism
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
When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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