Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Hope

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Love

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Success

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Education

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

I am I plus my circumstances.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Wisdom

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.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

Love