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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.

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
Humans
Towards
Without
Consequence
Betrays
Thing
Pure
Pathos
Often
Trend
Artist
Modesty
Art
Betray
Thought
Trends
Human
Arrogance

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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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.
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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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What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
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The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
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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.
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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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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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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset