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.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Jose Ortega y Gasset. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
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.
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.
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
I am I plus my circumstances.
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.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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.
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.
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.
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