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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
Else
Resort
Nothing
Resorts
Reduce
Attempt
Civilization
Lasts
Last
Force

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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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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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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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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
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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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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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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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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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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.
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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.
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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