Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes
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One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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Man is a fugitive from nature.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
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Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
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Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'
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We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
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I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
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The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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The real magic wand is the child's own mind.
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready.
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The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.
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Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.
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The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.
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In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
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He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.
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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
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