Quote

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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
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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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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The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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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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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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
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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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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
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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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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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
Jose Ortega y Gasset