230 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Man is a fugitive from nature.

A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.

"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.

The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.

All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.