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Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.

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
Human
Pretext
Humans
Glowing
Trembling
Vitality
Finds
Desert
Stills
Still
Exuberant

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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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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
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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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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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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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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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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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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.
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That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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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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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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