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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.

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
Everything
Atoms
Stained
Men
Scientific
Platitudes
Thousand
Smash
Blood
Discovers
Almost
Arrives
Science
Previously
Hands
Learnt
Truth
Slaughter

More quotes by 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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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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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
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The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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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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Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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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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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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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.
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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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset