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If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets 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
Actually
Intellect
Order
Solve
Problem
Inner
Human
Intelligence
Humans
Function
Men
Destiny
Problems
Functions
Wisdom
Sets

More quotes by 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.
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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
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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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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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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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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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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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The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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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