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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

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Jose Ortega y Gasset
Age: 72 †
Born: 1883
Born: May 9
Died: 1955
Died: October 18
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mathematician
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Sociologist
Translator
University Teacher
Madrid
Spain
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Much
Necessary
World
Position
Lasts
Last
Two
Complement
May
Nobility
Firsts
Positions
First
Equally

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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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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.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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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.
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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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.
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Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
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