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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

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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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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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The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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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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The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.
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When you are fed up with the troublesome present, you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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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
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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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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
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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.
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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.
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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.
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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.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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