Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

You must read history forward and not backward.

History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples.

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives.

Economics are part of our life. We try to treat them separately, like over there is the economy and here is history. Econ affects history and history often doesn't get it right if it doesn't respect econ.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.