230 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.