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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.

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
Cynicism
Convinced
Fail
Civilization
Failing
Parasite
Lives
Parasites
Reason
Cynic
Denying

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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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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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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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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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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
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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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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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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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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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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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