Top 40 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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

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

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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