José Ortega y Gasset

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”

“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.”

“Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.”

“Man has to be himself in spite of the circumstances.”

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.”

“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic 'ideas' and looks life in the face.”

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

“An 'idea' is a putting of truth in checkmate.”

“Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.”

“Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.”

“The poet begins where the man leaves off. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.”