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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.

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
Compulsion
Whether
Free
Wish

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be 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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Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.
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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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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.
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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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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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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There is no doubt even a rejection can be the shadow of a caress”.
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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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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 hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
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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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