José Ortega y Gasset

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 its surface.

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

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

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

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

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

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.

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

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.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

To excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we raised ourselves upon it.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

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

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 truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

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

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

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

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

The heart of man does not tolerqte an absence of the excellent and supreme.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

Triumph cannot help being cruel.

The form most contradictory to Human life that can appear among the human species is the “self-satisfied man.”

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

The trend toward pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence— just art with no other pretenses.

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.

As 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.

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

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

Life is a series of collisions with the future it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds.

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

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