Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes on Life
José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote (1914), The Modern Theme (1923), and the late What Is Philosophy? (1930) gave twentieth-century Spanish philosophy its most influential statement of the philosophy of vital reason (raciovitalismo). The famous formula — I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it I do not save myself — frames the human being not as a Cartesian thinking substance abstractable from its world but as the irreducible unity of self and historical situation in which life is the basic philosophical category. The framework, integrating Spanish Krausism with the German phenomenological tradition Ortega encountered in his Marburg studies under Cohen and Hartmann, shaped the subsequent Hispanic philosophical tradition through Zubiri, Marías, and the broader reception of European philosophy in the Spanish-speaking world.
Quotes
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“I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo. -
Attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset:
“Civilization is, before all else, the will to live in common.”
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Attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset:
“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.”
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Attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset:
“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”
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“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.”
Original: " La vida no puede esperar a que las ciencias expliquen científicamente el Universo . No se puede vivir ad kalendas graecas . El atributo más esencial de la existencia es su perentoriedad: la vida es siempre urgente. Se vive aquí y ahora sin posible demora ni traspaso. La vida nos es disparada a quemarropa. Ya la cultura, que no es sino su interpretación, no puede tampoco esperar. | Miss -
“Life is fired at us point blank.”
More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim. | Man and People [ El hombre y la gente ] (1957), p. 42, translated by Willard R. Trask. IS -
“More context: "To live or to be alive or, what is the same thing, to be a man, does not admit of any preparations or preliminary experiments. Life is fired at us point blank. ... Where and when we are born, or happen to find ourselves after we were born, there and then, like it or not, we must sink or swim.”
Life is fired at us point blank.