Jose Ortega y Gasset
In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.Collection: Spring
I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.Collection: Believe
The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Religious
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional oneCollection: Order
Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.Collection: Strong
The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.Collection: Book
One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.Collection: Song
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.Collection: Life Is
Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.Collection: Life
Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?Collection: Writing
The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.Collection: Believe
The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.Collection: Reality
He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.Collection: Truth
There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.Collection: Rejection
The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge today of any civilisation. The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.Collection: Taken
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."Collection: Men
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.Collection: Wisdom
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.Collection: Art
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.Collection: Garden
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.Collection: Russia
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.Collection: Civilization
Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.Collection: Men
Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.Collection: Men
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.Collection: Today
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.Collection: Motivation
Love is exclusivity, selection.Collection: Love Is
Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.Collection: Powerful
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.Collection: Government
Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.Collection: Stupidity
Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.Collection: Perfection
The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.Collection: Attitude
The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Truth
I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.Collection: Discovery
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.Collection: Men
This fighting-shy of every obligation partly explains the phenomenon, half ridiculous, half disgraceful, Of the setting-up in our days of the platform of "youth" as youth. ... In comic fashion people call themselves "young," because they have heard that youth has more rights than obligations, since it can put off the fulfilment of these latter to the Greek Kalends of maturity. ...[T]he astounding thing at present is that these take it as an effective right precisely in order to claim for themselves all those other rights which only belong to the man who has already done something.Collection: Fashion
In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.Collection: Stupid
All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.Collection: Possibility
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.Collection: Children
History is the science of people.Collection: People
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.Collection: Sports
And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.Collection: Life
The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.Collection: Truth
Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised worldCollection: Believe
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...Collection: Mean
By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Hunting
Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.Collection: Waiting