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

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The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
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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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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.
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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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Life is fired at us point blank.
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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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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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Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.
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We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
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Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
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A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
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The will to be oneself is heroism
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Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
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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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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 preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
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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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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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