José Ortega y Gasset

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.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

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

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

I am I plus my circumstances.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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

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

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

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

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

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

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.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

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

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.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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 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.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

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.

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

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.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

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.

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.

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