Quote

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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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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 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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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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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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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
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
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Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, and in the laws of Nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset