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Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.

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
Mean
Measure
Something
Setting
Fulfill
Make
Avoid
Definite
Life
Empty
Emptiness
Means
Dedicated
Nature
Mission
Human
Settings
Humans
Missions

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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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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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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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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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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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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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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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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Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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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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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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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
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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