Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

"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.

We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable.

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

We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.

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

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.

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 truth.

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

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

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

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

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.

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.

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.

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

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.

Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.