230 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

Man in a word has no nature; what he has. ..is history.

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

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

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

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

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. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

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.