José Ortega y Gasset > Quotes

“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
― José 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

“The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
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― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. ”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“For there is no doubt that 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.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“To remain in the past means to be dead.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.”
― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“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.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“The mass is all which sets no value on itself──good or ill──based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everything" ... The mass crushes beneath it everything which is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”
― Jose Ortega Ygasset, La rebelión de las masas

“From my point of view it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme

“Ser de la izquierda es, como ser de la derecha, una de las infinitas maneras que el hombre puede elegir para ser un imbécil.”
― José Ortega y Gasset

“Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank.”
― Jose Ortegay Y. Gasset

“The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses