José Ortega y Gasset

"Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries."

"To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty."

"Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries."

"Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort."

"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities."

"Man adapts himself to everything to the best and the worst."

"Let us tear down the romantic trappings that have adorned passion. Let us cease believing that the measure of a man’s love lies in how stupid he has become or is willing to be."

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

"…falling in love is a state of mental misery which has a restricting, impoverishing, and paralyzing effect upon the development of our consciousness."

"Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation."

"... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own..."

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

"Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life."

"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 postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank."

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

"The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension."