Quote

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

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
Attempt
Civilization
Lasts
Last
Force
Else
Resort
Nothing
Resorts
Reduce

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Image
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
Image
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Love is exclusivity, selection.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
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
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
To wonder is to begin to understand.
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