Quotes by José Ortega y Gasset

“Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.”

“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”

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

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

“Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.”

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

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

“An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.”

“I am I plus my circumstances.”

“We cannot put off living until we are ready.”

“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.”

“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”

“Law is born from despair of human nature.”

“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.”

“The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities.”

“Man adapts himself to everything to the best and the worst.”

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

“Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.”

“To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty.”

“Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.”