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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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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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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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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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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The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
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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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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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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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Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called public or popular opinion.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset