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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
Failing
Parasite
Lives
Parasites
Reason
Cynic
Denying
Cynicism
Convinced
Fail
Civilization

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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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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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Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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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.
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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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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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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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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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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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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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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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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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If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
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The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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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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