Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself.

Intellectual effort gives me enormous pleasure

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

I have some intellectual-type pursuits, like studying philosophy and stuff like that.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

The way is in training.

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet though you do not see them

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy.

What good is a theory of how the universe works if it’s a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

Never settle for the path of least resistance

Doing is very good, but that comes from thinking. Little manifestations of energy through the muscles are called work. But where there is no thought, there will be no work. Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.