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.

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.

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

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

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.

Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.

I am I plus my circumstances.

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.

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

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.

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

The will to be oneself is heroism

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.

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

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

The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.

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.

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

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

I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique.

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.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

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.

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.

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

Liberalism -- it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak.

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

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

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

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.

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

Love is exclusivity, selection.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

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

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.

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

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.