Jose Ortega y Gasset

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

A man with a clear head looks at life directly, realizes that everything is problematic, and feels himself lost.  And this is the simple truth, that to be alive is to feel oneself lost. And he who accepts this has already begun to find himself, to be on solid ground.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new.

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

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

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

Life means to have something definite to do--a mission to fulfill--and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.