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Quotes from History as a System — José Ortega y Gasset

1883–1955 Spain

← All quotes by José Ortega y Gasset

9 quotes

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

History as a System (1962)

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

History as a System (1962)

Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

History as a System (1962)

Man is no thing, but a drama... Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is... history.

History as a System (1935)

I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

History as a System (1962)

That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them

History as a System (1962)

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.

History as a System (1962)

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

History as a System (1962)

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?

History as a System (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: José Ortega y Gasset (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.