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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
Assurance
Characteristics
Wherever
Hour
Proclaim
Knowing
Corny
Rights
Impose
Hours
Characteristic
Mind
Commonplace

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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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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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.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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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.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
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Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega y Gasset