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

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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.
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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 will to be oneself is heroism
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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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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 type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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Natural man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
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Life is the external text, the burning bush by the edge of the path from which God speaks.
Jose Ortega y Gasset