Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

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.

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

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

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.

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.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

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.

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

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.