José Ortega y Gasset

Who was José Ortega y Gasset?

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. He was, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, a proponent of the idea of perspectivism.

Famous Quotes:

• For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
• An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
• 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.
• Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
• We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
• The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
• Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
• Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
• Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
• 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.