Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes - Page 2

Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

The real magic wand is the child's own mind.

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

I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

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

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

Life is fired at us point blank.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.

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

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

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

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

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

The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'