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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

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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
Every
Ruins
Life
Discover
Whose
Among
Ought
Less
Persons
Debris
Person
Ruin

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.
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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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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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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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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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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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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset