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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

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
Artist
Art
Persons
Person
Take
Ceasing
Mean
Seriously
Serious
Means

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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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.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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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.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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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 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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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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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
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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
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
Jose Ortega y Gasset