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

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Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, 'here and now' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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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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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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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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In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
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The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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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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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
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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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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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The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
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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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Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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