Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes
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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.
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There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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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.
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Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
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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.
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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.
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I am I plus my circumstances.
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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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.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
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Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
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We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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To live is to feel oneself lost.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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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.
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To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.