Quotes by José Ortega y Gasset

“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.””

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

“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.””

“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.””

“To remain in the past means to be dead.””

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

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

“Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.””

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.””

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.””

“From my point of view it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.””

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

“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.””

“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”