Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

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

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

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

The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.

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.

To wonder is to begin to understand.

The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.

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

Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.

[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.

The will to be oneself is heroism

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.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

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

I am I plus my circumstances.