Top 120 José Ortega y Gasset Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

52. “To wonder is to begin to understand.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

53. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

54. “Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

55. “The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

56. “In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

57. “To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

58. “Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

59. “To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

60. “Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

61. “The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— José Ortega y Gasset

63. “Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

64. “By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

65. “Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

66. “Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

67. “Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

68. “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

69. “Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

70. “Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

71. “This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

72. “Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?”

— José Ortega y Gasset

73. “The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, bu.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

74. “I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

75. “The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

76. “One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

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

— José Ortega y Gasset

78. “Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

79. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

80. “The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence...”

— José Ortega y Gasset

81. “Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

82. “There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

83. “That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

84. “A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

85. “Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

86. “The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

87. “Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

88. “Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

89. “The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

90. “It is not obligatory for a generation to have great men.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

91. “In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

92. “Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

93. “Biography – a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

94. “Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

95. “Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

96. “The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

97. “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.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

98. “We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

99. “We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.”

— José Ortega y Gasset

100. “Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.”

— José Ortega y Gasset