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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

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
Nothing
Resorts
Reduce
Attempt
Civilization
Lasts
Last
Force
Else
Resort

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence.
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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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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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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.
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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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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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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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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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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset