“The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities.”
More from José Ortega y Gasset on Life
“To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty.”
“All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.”
“An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.”
“Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.”
“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
“We cannot put off living until we are ready.”
“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”
“Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.”
Others on Life
Jonathan Safran Foer
22 quotes“One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second”
Mitch Albom
18 quotes“Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
16 quotes“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
Henry Miller
15 quotes“We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”
Lord Byron
14 quotes“The great art of life is sensation to feel that we exist even in pain.”
Cormac McCarthy
14 quotes“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn...”
Virginia Woolf
14 quotes“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Joseph Campbell
14 quotes“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive...”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
13 quotes“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
Søren Kierkegaard
13 quotes“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”
Margaret Atwood
13 quotes“Surviving Is the only warWe can afford”
Sarah Dessen
13 quotes“All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control....”