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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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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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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.
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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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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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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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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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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
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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 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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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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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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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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.
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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