A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
I am I plus my circumstances.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Law is born from despair of human nature.
– 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
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they markour limitations and our bounds. Life is a pretty thing unless itis moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
To live is to feel oneself lost.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands upon himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.