Daily Inspiration Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ortega y Gasset sneaks a paradox into what sounds like a pep talk: the artist is not defined by added gravitas but by a refusal to be impressed by the everyday self. That “very serious person” is a social construction - the dutiful citizen, the careerist, the rational manager of reputation - who insists that life is primarily a set of obligations and stable identities. Art begins when that persona stops being treated as the final authority.

The line lands because it treats seriousness as a kind of vanity. Ortega isn’t mocking depth; he’s mocking the anxious performance of depth we adopt when we’re trying to be legible to others and to ourselves. To “cease to take seriously” is to puncture the ego’s claim to permanence and to make room for play, experiment, and a willingness to look foolish. That’s why the phrasing doubles back on itself: “serious” becomes suspect precisely when it hardens into self-importance.

Context matters: Ortega wrote in a Europe rattled by mass politics and an increasingly standardized public life, and he famously argued that modern art dehumanizes - not as cruelty, but as strategy, pulling us away from sentimental identification and toward form, irony, distance. This quote belongs to that project. The artist, for Ortega, is someone who steps out of the crowd’s moral melodrama and treats the self as material, not monument. The subtext is almost ethical: if you can’t loosen your grip on the persona you protect, you can’t make anything new.