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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

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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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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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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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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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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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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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The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
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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.
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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
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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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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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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset