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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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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
Perhaps
Tool
Inside
Metaphor
Verges
Inspiring
Metaphoric
Seems
Inspire
Potentialities
Made
Tools
Efficacy
Men
Creatures
Fruitful
Magic
Verge
Creation
Forgot

More quotes by 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
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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.
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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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset