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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

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
Last
Force
Use
Resort
Power
Resorts
Nothing
Reduce
Civilization
Effort
Lasts

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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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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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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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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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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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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 good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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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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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 will to be oneself is heroism
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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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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
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