Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

• 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.

  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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  Tags in Innovation, Creativity

• Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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• To live is to feel oneself lost.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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• Law is born from despair of human nature.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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  Tags in Law And Lawyers

• Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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  Tags in Civilization

• Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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• An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

  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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  Tags in Integrity/Individuality, Attention, Purpose, Intention

• Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

  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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• Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

  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

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Frustration, Duty

• Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

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  Tags in Acceptance

• Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• 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

• A Don Juan is not a man who loves women, but a man that women love.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

• I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

Jose Ortega y Gasset (55)

Birth:	9th May, 1883
Death:	18th October, 1955
Nationality:	Spanish
Profession:	Essayist, Philosopher

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