230 Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

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.

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.

I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

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

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

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

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.