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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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What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
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 hunter is the alert man. But this itself-life as complete alertness-is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The will to be oneself is heroism
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
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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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Liberalism... is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Love is exclusivity, selection.
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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Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Man in a word has no nature what he has... is history.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that falling in love...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
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