José Ortega y Gasset Quotes

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

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to l...

All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.

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

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

Law is born from despair of human nature.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coercive...

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

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

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

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

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

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life...

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we ...

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone ...

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from ...

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

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Li...

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mo...

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, in...

…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing ...

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

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the m...

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

... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as ...

Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagi...

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things...

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coercive...

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the m...

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note t...

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, ...

Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." An...

When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes beca...

So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, whic...

To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of ...

I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.

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

Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fight...

The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vital...

Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly drama...

On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in its...

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the...

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the o...

The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violen...

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common deno...

Thinking of things" is but a special way of dealing with them; but, as is obvious, it is a secondary...