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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

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
Preserve
Preserves
Plus
Latter
Environment
Land
Stewardship
Surroundings

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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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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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 past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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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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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
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