José Ortega y Gasset

“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”

“The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.”

“So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits—as Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did—but for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know.”

“Thinking of things" is but a special way of dealing with them; but, as is obvious, it is a secondary manner of doing so and thus presupposes another [i.e., the primordial one]. The fundamental error—the "intellectualist" error—committed in Greece and modern Europe is tantamount to presupposing the opposite and to regarding one's intellectual manner of relating to things as one's primordial way of living. Descartes thus dared to define a human being, that is, the one living or "self," as une chose qui pense d'autres choses ["a thing that thinks of other things"]. That's done it! As if living were just being engaged in thinking of things! What about stumbling on them?”

“ההיסטוריה האנושית היא דרמה פנימית: היא מתחוללת בתוך הנפשות.”

“האהבה במהותה אינה אלא בחירה הפורצת מתוך העומק ההיולי, החייתי והפנימי של האישיות, ומצביע על ההעדפות האינטימיות ביותר המעצבות את האופי האנושי.”

“השכל והרצון אינם אלא קרום פריך העוטף את עיקרה של הווייתנו, שפנימה אינו רציונלי ואף אינו חופשי.”

“האדם האוהב יוצא מתוך עצמו; הרי זה הניסיון הגדול ביותר שעשה הטבע לאפשר לאדם לצאת מתוך סגירותו לעבר משהו השונה ממנו.”

“אהבותינו מפגינות את המהות הפנימית ביותר שלנו.”

“האיש השואף למצוינות הוא זה שדוחה את מה שהוא מוצא בנפשו ללא מאמץ קודם, ומקבל כראוי רק את מה שעדיין רחוק מעליו ומה שדורש מאמץ נוסף כדי להגיע אליו.”

“אלה התובעים מעצמם תביעות גדולות, מערימים על עצמם קשיים וחובות, ואלה שאינם תובעים מעצמם דבר מיוחד, ולדידם לחיות משמעו להיות תמיד מה שהם, מבלי שיכפו עליהם מאמץ כלשהו להתקדם לכיוון השלמות.”

“הידיעה כיצד לפקד על עצמך היא התנאי הראשון לכך שתוכל לפקד על אחרים.”

“אם אתה מלמד, זה גם מלמד אותך לפקפק במה שאתה מלמד.”

“אי אפשר לומר שהמשורר רודף אחרי האמת, מכיוון שהוא יוצר אותה.”

“זה לא רעב, אלא להיפך, שפע ועודף אנרגיה הם הגורמים למלחמה.”

“להיות מופתע, זה להתחיל להבין.”

“Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.”

“Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.”

“And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.”

“Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.”