Quotes By Jose Ortega Y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

I am I plus my circumstances.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.