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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.

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
Intellectual
Special
Sports
Wonder
Understand
Surprised
Men
Sport
Luxury
Begin

More quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset

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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To wonder is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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 form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the self-satisfied man.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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
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Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.
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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset