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

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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
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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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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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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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Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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.
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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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.
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
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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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Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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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.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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