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

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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
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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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Life is fired at us point blank.
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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The hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
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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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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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We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
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Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset