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. Jose Ortega y Gasset More Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset More Quotes From Jose Ortega y Gasset The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. Jose Ortega y Gasset failing cynicism civilization Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. Jose Ortega y Gasset human-life contradiction biographies 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. Jose Ortega y Gasset exaggeration-is force thinking Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history. Jose Ortega y Gasset men history The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega y Gasset poet ends men tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality. Jose Ortega y Gasset appreciate eye reality 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. Jose Ortega y Gasset centaurs half men 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 hunting religious men The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Jose Ortega y Gasset type emotional heart Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack. Jose Ortega y Gasset struggle answers life The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world. Jose Ortega y Gasset reality world thinking 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? Jose Ortega y Gasset finals roots mean The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture. Jose Ortega y Gasset choices views culture 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 erosion language writing Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. Jose Ortega y Gasset debris ruins life-is 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 truth men science The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration. Jose Ortega y Gasset landscape philosophical men 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. Jose Ortega y Gasset accepting simple life 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. Jose Ortega y Gasset librarian library book Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book. Jose Ortega y Gasset library giving book
