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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

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
Initials
Choice
View
Views
Choices
Point
Culture
Initial

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
Jose Ortega y Gasset