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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

- Jose Ortega y Gasset