Daily Inspiration Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ortega pulls off a neat provocation: the only way to save a classic is to stop treating him like a saint. The line is engineered to scandalize reverence, because for Ortega reverence is a kind of cultural embalming. When a “classic” becomes an object of piety, you don’t read him so much as you perform him - quoting, genuflecting, assigning him as a badge of taste. That posture preserves the author’s prestige while quietly killing his force.

The intent is aggressively practical. Ortega is writing in a Europe where “culture” often meant inheritance, not encounter: a canon held up as proof of refinement in the midst of political upheaval and mass society. His broader project (especially in the interwar years) worries about a public sphere crowded with opinions but thin on disciplined thought. In that setting, the classic can become either a museum piece for elites or a slogan everyone invokes and nobody wrestles with.

The subtext is almost therapeutic: classics should be used, not admired. “Use him for our own salvation” doesn’t mean self-help; it means intellectual rescue from the present’s complacencies - the provincial assumption that our moment is automatically smarter than the past. Ortega’s imperative is anti-antiquarian. A classic survives precisely when he is allowed to argue with us, to be misread productively, even to be recruited into current crises.

So the irony is that fidelity looks like irreverence. To “give up revering” is to stop protecting the classic from contamination by the now, and start letting him contaminate us instead.