Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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

Love is exclusivity, selection.

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

On the Bigotry of Culture: : it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.

Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years

falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness.

The combinations of these two elements, enchantment and surrender, is, then, essential to the love which we are discussing... What exists in love is surrender due to enchantment.

He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.

In a way the philosopher and the barber are of the same guild; the barber cuts hair and the philosopher splits hairs.

I am myself and my circumstance. I live therefore I think.

El buen lector es que tiene casi constantemente la impresión de que no se ha enterado bien.

In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported … Civilization is not "just here," it is not self-supporting.

In order to be enchanted we must be, above all, capable of seeing another person—simply opening one's eyes will not do.

No viven juntás las gentes sin más ni más y porque sí; esa cohesion a priori sólo existe en la familia. Los grupos que integran un Estado viven juntos para algo: son una comunidad de propósitos, de anhelos, de grandes utilidades. No conviven por estar juntos, sino para hacer juntos algo.

What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic

The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly.

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.

Nada de lo que el hombre ha sido, es o será, lo ha sido, lo es ni lo será de una vez para siempre, sino que ha llegado a serlo un buen día y otro buen día dejará de serlo.

Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?

Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.

rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.