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

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Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
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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 wonder is to begin to understand.
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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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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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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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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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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.
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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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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