Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world
Jose Ortega y GassetThe form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."
Jose Ortega y GassetThe 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 GassetTo be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.
Jose Ortega y GassetImagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.
Jose Ortega y Gasset