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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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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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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.
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What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
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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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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
Jose Ortega y Gasset