Jose Ortega y Gasset

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.”

“To live is to feel oneself lost.”

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

“Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.”

“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.”

“The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.”

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

“Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.”

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

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

“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”

“To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.”

“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.”

“Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.”

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

“I am I plus my circumstances.”

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”