Jose Ortega Y Gasset Quotes

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

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.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

I am I plus my circumstances.

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

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

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.

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.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.