Best Quotes by Jose Ortega y Gasset (Top 10)
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: Those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, bu
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
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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Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am I plus my circumstances.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
More Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes
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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.
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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The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
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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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
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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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, 'here and now,' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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 difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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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.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
Jose Ortega y Gasset