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

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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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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 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.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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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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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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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 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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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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