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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

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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
Saying
Distinguish
Common
Demands
Success
Latter
Makes
Excellence
Great
Excellent
Men
Former
Life
Intelligence
Demand

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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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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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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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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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset