Words matter. These are the best Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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.
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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 a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
I am I plus my circumstances.
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
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.
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.
Biography – a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
Law is born from despair of human nature.
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.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
