I’ve never really read anything by Ortega y Gasset, but this is a pretty awesome quote from his 1929 Revolt of the Masses

“For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened of finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true; he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

Nabbed this off a page of cool gnostically/existentially themed quotations from a variety of writers and thinkers throughout history.