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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
Ought
Tell
Past
Avoid
Regret
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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
To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
