Jose Ortega y Gasset
These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Determination
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.Collection: Running
Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.Collection: Hate
Life is fired at us point blank.Collection: Life
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.Collection: Ruins
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.Collection: Heart
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.Collection: Life
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.Collection: Civilization
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by manCollection: Power
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.Collection: Power
[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.Collection: Country
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.Collection: Sarcastic
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.Collection: Men
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Men
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.Collection: Wish
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.Collection: Heart
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.Collection: Views
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.Collection: Struggle
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.Collection: Men