Jose Ortega Quotes

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.

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

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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 real magic wand is the child's own mind.

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

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.

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

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.

Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

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

Life is fired at us point blank.

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.

Man is a fugitive from nature.

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.

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

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

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.

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.

There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

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

Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.

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

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.

The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost.

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

And 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.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.

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

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

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.

There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.