Quotes By Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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.

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

To live is to feel oneself lost.

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.

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.

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.