Home > Work > The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
1 " 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. "
― José Ortega y Gasset , The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
2 " 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. "
3 " Nuestras convicciones más arraigadas, más indubitables, son las más sospechosas. Ellas constituyen nuestros límites, nuestros confines, nuestra prisión. Poca es la vida si no piafa en ella un afán formidable de ampliar sus fronteras. Se vive en la proporción en que se ansía vivir más. Toda obstinación en mantenernos dentro de nuestro horizonte habitual significa debilidad, decadencia de las energías vitales. El horizonte es una línea biológica, un órgano viviente de nuestro ser; mientras gozamos de plenitud, el horizonte emigra, se dilata, ondula elástico casi al compás de nuestra respiración. En cambio, cuando el horizonte se fija es que se ha anquilosado y que nosotros ingresamos en la vejez. "
