Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Future
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.Collection: Brainy
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.Collection: Poetry
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.Collection: Love
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.Collection: Death
We cannot put off living until we are ready.Collection: Life
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.Collection: Great
I am I plus my circumstances.Collection: Life
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.Collection: Age
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.Collection: Imagination
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
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.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
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.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
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.
Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
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.
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.
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.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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.
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.
There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
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.
With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.Collection: Mistake
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.Collection: Regret
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Acceptance
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.Collection: Adversity
To wonder is to begin to understand.Collection: Wonder
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.Collection: Land
Life is a series of collisions with the future.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Life
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.Collection: Inspirational