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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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
Last
Force
Use
Resort
Power
Resorts
Nothing
Reduce
Civilization
Effort
Lasts
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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
The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.
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
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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
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
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
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
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
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
tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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
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
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
