What Is Philosophy? Quotes

“Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the rigorous quality of its assumptions. But experimental science wins these admirable qualities at the cost of maintaining itself on a plane of secondary problems and leaving the decisive and ultimate questions intact. Out of this renunciation it makes its essential virtue, and for this, if for nothing else, it deserves applause. But experimental science is only a meager portion of the mind and the organism. Where it stops, man does not stop. If the physicist stays the hand with which he delineates things at the point where his methods end, the human being who stands behind every physicist prolongs the line and carries it on to the end, just as our eye, seeing a portion of a broken arch, automatically completes the missing airy curve.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy?

“The shameful thing is not ignorance—on the contrary, that is the natural thing. The really shameful thing is to not want to know, to resist finding out when the occasion offers.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy?

“Philosophy is knowledge of the Universe, or of everything there is, but when we set forth on its quest we know neither what there is, nor if what there is forms a Universe or a Multi-verse, nor whether Universe or Multi-verse will be knowable. The enterprise, then, seems mad. Why undertake it? Would it not be more prudent to drop it, to dedicate oneself solely to living, and dispense with philosophizing? For the old Roman hero, on the contrary, it was necessary to navigate but it was not necessary to live, Man will always be divided into two classes, of whom the better will find the superfluous to be the most necessary.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy?