Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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
Free
Wish
Compulsion
Whether
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The will to be oneself is heroism
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
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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
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
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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
To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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 difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
