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

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Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
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The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
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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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There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
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I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
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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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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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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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Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
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Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.
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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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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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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
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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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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
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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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