Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To wonder is to begin to understand.
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
Begin
Wonder
Understand
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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 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
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
Love is exclusivity, selection.
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
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
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
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 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
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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
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
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
