Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The real magic wand is the child's own mind.

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.