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

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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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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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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 hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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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.
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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
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In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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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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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
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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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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.
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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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