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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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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
History
Fall
Back
Need
Whole
Needs
Entirety
Escape
Study

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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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It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
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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Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset