Jose Ortega y Gasset famous quotes

The will to be oneself is heroism
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Heroism #Oneself

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Hurt #Effort

To wonder is to begin to understand.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Wonder

To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Mean #Identity #Lacking

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Views #Choices #Culture

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.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Inspirational #Life #Bad Ass

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Truth #Views #Looks

I am I plus my circumstances.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Plus #Circumstances

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Gratitude #Attention #Pay

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Life #People #Side Dishes

Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Life #Mean #Empty

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Life #Unemployed #Existence

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.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Men #Poet #Ends

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Persons #Small Things

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Hatred #Feelings #Politics

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.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Thinking #Force #Exaggeration

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Biographies #Contradiction #Human Life

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Mean #Men #Excellence

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Environment #Surroundings #Latter

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Mean #Artist #Serious

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Running #Destiny #Civilization

The real magic wand is the child's own mind.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Children #Real #Magic

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
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Adversity #Men #Class

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Song #History #Age

We cannot put off living until we are ready.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Inspirational Life #Ready

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Love #Confusion #Vitality

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Adolescence #Poetry Is

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Moving On #Moving Forward #Decision

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.
-- Jose Ortega y Gasset

#Life #Success #Men

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

#Life #Struggle #Answers