Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

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.

I am I plus my circumstances.

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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

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

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

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

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

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent "here and now " without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

The past will not tell us what we ought to do but... what we ought to avoid.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

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