Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

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

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

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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

To live is to feel oneself lost.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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

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

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
Jose Ortega y Gasset