Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

A man with a clear head looks at life directly, realizes that everything is problematic, and feels himself lost.  And this is the simple truth, that to be alive is to feel oneself lost. And he who accepts this has already begun to find himself, to be on solid ground.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

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

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

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

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

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.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.