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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.

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
Common
Demands
Success
Latter
Makes
Excellence
Great
Excellent
Men
Former
Life
Intelligence
Demand
Saying
Distinguish

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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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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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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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To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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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.
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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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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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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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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