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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.

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
Last
Two
Complement
May
Nobility
Firsts
Positions
First
Equally
Much
Necessary
World
Position
Lasts

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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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.
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That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
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We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset