Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress".

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.

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

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

To remain in the past means to be dead.

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.

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.

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.

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.

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

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

Europe is really a swarm: many bees on a single course.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

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