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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
Trembling
Vitality
Finds
Desert
Stills
Still
Exuberant
Human
Pretext
Humans
Glowing

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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
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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.
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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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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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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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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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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