Jose Ortega Y Gasset Quotes

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

To wonder is to begin to understand.

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

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.

The will to be oneself is heroism

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

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

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

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

Love is exclusivity, selection.

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

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

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...

Law is born from despair of human nature.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

History is the science of people.

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

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

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

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

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.