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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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
Possibilities
Possibility
Given
Another
Thing
Make
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called public or popular opinion.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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
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
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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
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