Oralia Ortega Quotes

The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

My dad was a bass player in a Latino band when I was growing up. So we always had musical instruments in our basement. ~ Lindi Ortega

To want to be an actor is enough - you don't need to tell us about it. The interesting person who comes with some life experience is always the person who is going to be chosen by me. ~ Kenny Ortega

I do not know about you. But, I prefer a life spent making mistakes than a life making none. ~ Ana Ortega

My idol was Sandino, and also Christ. I was brought up a Christian, but I regarded Christ as a rebel, a revolutionary. ~ Daniel Ortega

I am myself and my circumstance. I live therefore I think. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

One has to bear in mind that during my childhood and adolescence, I suffered the repression of the Somoza dictatorship in every way: economically, socially, as well as at the hands of the police
because if we went out on the street to play baseball, for example, the police would come and beat us up and put us in prison. ~ Daniel Ortega

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. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Oh, also, if Mr. Ortega catches me writing you this letter, I am committed to shoving it in my mouth and swallowing. I hope I can count on the same commitment from you. ~ Kasie West

Surprising condition, this, of our existence! To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide. ~ Ortega Y Gasset

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? ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality? ~ Ortega Y Gasset

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.
When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've written some really bad songs and I've had some bad performances. ~ Lindi Ortega

When life hurts, have a date with your feelings.
Breath and let the magic begin! ~ Ana Ortega

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Law is born from despair of human nature. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

You are someone. ~ Ana Ortega

Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

History is the science of people. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

As this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Certain social situations make me feel like a square peg in a round hole. Realising you can connect to the human race through song makes me feel less alien. ~ Lindi Ortega

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 postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Find the joy in your everyday situations. You have the choice, you always did and you will always do. Thrive. ~ Ana Ortega

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

[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. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset