230 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

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

To live is to feel oneself lost.

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

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

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.

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.