Quote

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

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
Opinion
Prevailing
Public
Meditating
Called
Inevitably
Around
Theme
Doe
Popular
Meditation
Positive
Honest
Separates

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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 characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
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