Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Avoid
Regret
Ought
Tell
Past
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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
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
Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Love is exclusivity, selection.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
