Top 40 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

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.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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

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

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.

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.