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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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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
Mark
Limitations
Moved
Suspects
Firmest
Fame
Urges
Indomitable
Unless
Limitation
Convictions
Thing
Certainty
Extend
Life
Boundaries
Suspect
Bounds
Urge
Conviction
Petty

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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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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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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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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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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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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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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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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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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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I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
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