Top 120 José Ortega y Gasset Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— José Ortega y Gasset

3. “Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

4. “All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

5. “We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

6. “These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

7. “I am I plus my circumstances.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

8. “To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

9. “Love is exclusivity, selection.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

10. “Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us – by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. ‘To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.’”

— José Ortega y Gasset

11. “I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

12. “The real magic wand is the child’s own mind.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

13. “We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

14. “Life is fired at us point blank.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

15. “The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

16. “Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

17. “An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

18. “What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— José Ortega y Gasset

20. “Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

21. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

22. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

23. “He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

24. “The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

25. “In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

26. “The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

27. “Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

28. “We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

29. “Law is born from despair of human nature.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

30. “The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

31. “With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

32. “We cannot put off living until we are ready.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

33. “The will to be oneself is heroism.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

34. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

35. “The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

36. “History is the science of people.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

37. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

38. “The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— José Ortega y Gasset

40. “A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

41. “All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

42. “The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

43. “Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

44. “Man is a fugitive from nature.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

45. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

46. “Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

47. “The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history – its mass appeal.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

48. “Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

49. “Life is a series of collisions with the future.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

50. “Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.”

— José Ortega y Gasset