Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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
Mean
Constitutive
Lacking
Identity
Free
Means
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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
I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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
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
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
I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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
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
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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
