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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
Latter
Environment
Land
Stewardship
Surroundings
Preserve
Preserves
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More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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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 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.
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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 form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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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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Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset