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.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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.

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

We cannot put off living until we are ready.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

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

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

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.

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

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

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