Quotes By Jose Ortega Y Gasset

To live is to feel oneself lost.

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.

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.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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.

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.

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.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.