Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

When people are struggling, that's a painful place to be in, to not know who you are and where you belong and what you desire.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!

I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

I do not know who I am tonight.

Did you ever look in the mirror And see a stranger standing there? Did you ever drive for miles and miles And wonder how on earth you got yourself there?

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

Right now everything looks so strange to me, as if I don't belong here. It's me that's out of place. And the worst thing is that I feel there's somewhere I do belong, but I just can't find it.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

I look at my hands and go, 'Hmm...what happened? Whose hands are those? Oh my God, they're mine'

I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die . . . again. But I choose to come back, why?

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.