José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" which "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism and his realist historicism which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.