Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotations

Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

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 is no doubt; even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.

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

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.