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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.
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
Rights
Impose
Hours
Characteristic
Mind
Commonplace
Assurance
Characteristics
Wherever
Hour
Proclaim
Knowing
Corny
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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
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
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
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The will to be oneself is heroism
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
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
