José Ortega y Gasset cytaty

strona 2

„Wszystko, co kocham, traci na wartości połowę, jeśli nie ma Cię obok mnie, aby dzielić to ze mną.”

„Człowiek jest żyjącą niewystarczalnością.”

„Wystarczy, że dana jest nam szansa, byśmy mogli stać się tym, czym chcemy.”

„Dopiero w samotności człowiek jest naprawdę sobą.”

„Ja to ja sam i moje otoczenie. Nie ochronię siebie, jeśli nie będę chronić otoczenia.”

„Każdy z nas jest ignorantem, tyle że w różnych dziedzinach wiedzy.”

„Zdziwienie, zaskoczenie to początek zrozumienia. To specyficzny i ekskluzywny sport i luksus intelektualistów. Dlatego też charakterystycznym dla nich gestem jest patrzenie na świat rozszerzonymi ze zdziwienia źrenicami. Cały otaczający nas świat jest dziwny i cudowny, jeśli nań spojrzeć szeroko otwartymi oczami. To właśnie, uleganie radosnemu zdziwieniu, jest rozkoszą dla futbolisty niedostępną, natomiast dzięki niej intelektualista idzie przez życie pogrążony w nie kończącym się, wizjonerskim upojeniu, którego oznaką zewnętrzną jest zdziwienie widoczne w oczach. Dlatego też dla starożytnych symbolem Minerwy była sowa, ptak, którego oczy są zawsze szeroko otwarte, jak gdyby w niemym zdziwieniu.”

„Dla chwili obecnej charakterystyczne jest to, że umysły przeciętne i banalne, wiedząc o swej przeciętności i banalności, mają czelność domagać się prawa do bycia przeciętnymi i banalnymi i do narzucania tych cech wszystkim innym.”

„Dlatego też ludzi w ten sposób żyjących nazywamy masą, nie tylko ze względu na ich liczbę, ile ze względu na to, że życie ich jest bezwładne i bezwolne.”

„Najbardziej radykalny z możliwych podziałów, jakie można przeprowadzić wśród ludzi, to taki który dzieli ich na dwie klasy stworzeń – takich, którzy bardzo wiele wymagają od siebie, nie szczędząc sobie trudności i obowiązków oraz takich, którzy od siebie nie wymagają niczego szczególnego, lecz dla których żyć znaczy w każdym momencie być tym, czym naprawdę są, bez zmuszania się do jakiejkolwiek perfekcji, po prostu jak boje unoszące się na falach.”

“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities.”

“Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"… is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.”

“Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.”

“Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.”

“To remain in the past means to be dead.”

“Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”

“What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.”

“Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. … Already in the times of the Antonines (IInd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratised. What results? The bureaucratisation of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders.”

“That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.”

“The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialisation has been that to-day, when there are more "scientists" than ever, there are much less "cultured" men than, for example, about 1750. And the worst is that with these turnspits of science not even the real progress of science itself is assured. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and, as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge. Newton was able to found his system of physics without knowing much philosophy, but Einstein needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before he could reach his own keen synthesis. Kant and Mach — the names are mere symbols of the enormous mass of philosophic and psychological thought which has influenced Einstein.”

“[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.”

“Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.”

“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.”

“The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. … An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility”

“It would be wrong to suppose that the man of any particular period always looks upon past times as below the level of his own, simply because they are past. It is enough to recall that to the seeming of Jorge Manrique, "Any time gone by was better."… From A. D. 150 on, this impression of a shrinking of vitality, of a falling from position, of decay and loss of pulse shows itself increasingly in the Roman Empire. Had not Horace already sung: "Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still?"”

“Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. … Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.”

“I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.”

“The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”

“To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it — and this is what almost all historians have believed — is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. …[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.”

“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.”

“As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis.”

“The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."”

“Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, “We have a genius for what we like.” Genius, man’s superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.”

“When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?”

“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.”

“I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This also is most natural and confirms the theorem. For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the "rebel mass." It is precisely what I mean by having one's soul obliterated, hermetically closed. Here it would be the special case of intellectual hermetism.”

“I am I and my circumstance, and if I don't save it I don't save myself.”

“[I]t would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of to-day of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.”