Jose Ortega y Gasset
24 quotes
"Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else."
"An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."
"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."
"We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it."
"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."
"Man adapts himself to everything to the best and the worst."
"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."
"What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones."
"All life is the struggle the effort to be itself."
"Abasement degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be."
"Abasement degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be."
"The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration."
"Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts."
"For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great."
"An idea is a putting truth in check-mate."
"I am I plus my circumstances."
"We cannot put off living until we are ready."
"Law is born from despair of human nature."
"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities."
"Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort."
"To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty."
"Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance."
"The past will not tell us what we ought to do but... what we ought to avoid."
"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."