Top 40 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

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.

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 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.

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

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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.