Quote

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

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
Writing
Language
Rebellion
Making
Established
Environs
Write
Consists
Subversion
Social
Current
Erosion
Away
Currents
Norms
Form
Wearing
Continuously
Wells
Permanent
Grammar
Well
Small
Norm

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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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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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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
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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 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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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.
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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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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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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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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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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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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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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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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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The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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