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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...

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
Means
Mean
Constitutive
Lacking
Identity
Free

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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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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.
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Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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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.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
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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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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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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.
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Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand, has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked the surface.
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The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
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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.
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