We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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. – Jose 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. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
