Jose Ortega y Gasset Order Quotations

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

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

He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'

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

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