Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

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.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

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.'

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.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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

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

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

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 hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.

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.

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.

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

Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.

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