Jose Ortega y Gasset's Quotes

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.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

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

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.