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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called public or popular opinion.
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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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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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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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The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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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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One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
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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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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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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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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.
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The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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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.
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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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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