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It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.

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
Today
Anybody
Flatter
Would
Cold
Accuse
Men
Pieces
Accusation
Leave
Commonplace
Everybody
Boast
Moral
Code
Rather
Lack
Boasts
Become
Piece
Practising

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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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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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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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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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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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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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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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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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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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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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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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.
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