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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Jose Ortega y Gasset
Age: 72 †
Born: 1883
Born: May 9
Died: 1955
Died: October 18
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mathematician
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Sociologist
Translator
University Teacher
Madrid
Spain
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Woman
Means
Others
Mean
Men
Excellence
Asks
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called public or popular opinion.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
