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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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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
Men
Stature
Primarily
Mediocre
Nation
Ones
Nations
Makes
Great
Innumerable
More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Life is fired at us point blank.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
