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

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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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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.
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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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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.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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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.
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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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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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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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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
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