Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Discovering new truths often requires rejecting old beliefs and ideas.
This quote by José Ortega y Gasset highlights the transformative yet painful process of scientific discovery. It suggests that a true innovator must confront and dismantle established ideas—referred to metaphorically as 'smashing to atoms'—to make way for new understandings, often resulting in a struggle that can feel both brutal and necessary for advancement.
Themes
ScienceDiscoveryTruthInnovationBeliefs
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on scientific innovation, you might say this quote to emphasize the struggle behind significant discoveries.
More from Jose Ortega Y Gasset
All quotes →"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
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.
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I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
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We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
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