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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.

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
Others
Cannot
Whole
Sung
Understood
Completely
Age
Song
History

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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Life is fired at us point blank.
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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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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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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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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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal.
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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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.
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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 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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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Law is born from despair of human nature.
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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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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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