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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.

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
Lives
Witnessing
Lost
Innumerable
Give
Gigantic
Anything
Labyrinth
Human
Spectacle
Humans
Wandering
Giving
Wander
Years
Motivation
Labyrinths

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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
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Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
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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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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 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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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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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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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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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
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tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
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The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
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That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
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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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