35 Notable Quotes By José Ortega Y Gasset, The Great Spanish Philosopher
Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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.
Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
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.
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
There is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
To remain in the past means to be dead.
Tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
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.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
![Persistent ill-humour is all too clear an indication that someone is living contrary to his[her] intended purpose.](https://www.wisdomly.net/images/quotes/jos-ortega-y-gasset-29123.jpg)
Persistent ill-humour is all too clear an indication that someone is living contrary to his[her] intended purpose.
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.
…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness.
The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly.
I am myself and my circumstance. I live therefore I think.
The existence of language is, in a way, a continual denigration of words.
Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years
Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
Man,then, rather than by what he he is,or by what he has,escapes the zooological scale by what he does,by his conduct.hence it is that he must always keep watch on himself.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
![[...] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.](https://www.wisdomly.net/images/quotes/jos-ortega-y-gasset-29134.jpg)
[...] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.
