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Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called public or popular opinion.

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
Honest
Separates
Opinion
Prevailing
Public
Meditating
Called
Inevitably
Around
Theme
Doe
Popular
Meditation
Positive

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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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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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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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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Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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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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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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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Life is fired at us point blank.
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.
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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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset