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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.

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
Seems
Mass
Reverse
Tapestry
Scene
Scenes
Masks
Side
Mask
Twin
Comedy
Appeals
Viewed
Full
Comic
Countless
Sides
Tragedy
Woven
History
Fronts
Twins
Truth
Front
Appeal

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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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.
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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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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The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
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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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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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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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To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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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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Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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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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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega y Gasset