Quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

A society without an aristocracy, without an elite minority, is not a society.

Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.

The Mediterraneans, who do not think clearly, do see clearly.

Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence, and in its style one can see reflected the capacities of a race.

I am a Spaniard, that is to say, a man without imagination.

Minorities are individuals or groups of individuals especially qualified. The masses are the collection of people not specially qualified.

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.

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

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

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence itis the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

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.

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

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

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.

Every moment the work that you are doing itself is miraculous ,it gives you optimum satisfaction._____ SRChigari Associate Prof

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

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

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, bu

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.

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.