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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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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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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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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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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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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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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 past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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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
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Jose Ortega y Gasset