Quotes By Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

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

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

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

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

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

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.

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.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

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.