Quote

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

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
Song
History
Others
Cannot
Whole
Sung
Understood
Completely
Age

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Image
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
Image
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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
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
Image
The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
Image
To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
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
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
Image
To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Image
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
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 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
Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
Jose Ortega y Gasset