Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

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.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.

Life is fired at us point blank.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.

And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.