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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.

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
Danger
Palpitating
Hand
Vitals
Times
Pricked
Felt
Penetrated
Hands
Whoever
Really
Surface
Merely
Destiny

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens , to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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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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To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
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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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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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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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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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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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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
Jose Ortega y Gasset