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Were Art To Redeem Man, It Could Do So Only By Saving Him From The Seriousness Of Life And Restoring Him To An Unexpected Boyishness. The Symbol Of Art Is Seen Again In The Magic Flute Of The Great God Pan Which Makes The Young Goats Frisk At The Edge Of The Grove. All Modern Art Begins To Appear Comprehensible And In A Way Great When It Is Interpreted As An Attempt To Instill Youthfulness Into An Ancient World.

-Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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Were Art To Redeem

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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Were Art To Redeem Man, It Could Do So Only By Saving Him From The Seriousness Of Life And Restoring Him To An Unexpected Boyishness. The Symbol Of Art Is Seen Again In The Magic Flute Of The Great God Pan Which Makes The Young Goats Frisk At The Edge Of The Grove. All Modern Art Begins To Appear Comprehensible And In A Way Great When It Is Interpreted As An Attempt To Instill Youthfulness Into An Ancient World.

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If The Human Intellect Functions, It Is Actually In Order To Solve The Problems Which The Man's Inner Destiny Sets It.

The Masses Think That Is Is Easy To Flee From Reality, When It Is The Most Difficult Thing In The World.

Men Play At Tragedy Because They Do Not Believe In The Reality Of The Tragedy Which Is Actually Being Staged In The Civilised World

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On The Bigotry Of Culture: : It Presented Us With Culture, With Thought As Something Justified In Itself, That Is, Which Requires No Justification But Is Valid By It's Own Essence, Whatever Its Concrete Employment And Content Maybe. Human Life Was To Put Itself At The Service Of Culture Because Only Thus Would It Become Charged With Value. From Which It Would Follow That Human Life, Our Pure Existence Was, In Itself, A Mean And Worthless Thing.

Since Love Is The Most Delicate And Total Act Of A Soul, It Will Reflect The State And Nature Of The Soul.

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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.

The Struggle With The Past Is Not A Hand-to-hand Fight. The Future Overcomes It By Swallowing It. If It Leaves Anything Outside It Is Lost.

The Cynic, A Parasite Of Civilization, Lives By Denying It, For The Very Reason That He Is Convinced That It Will Not Fail.

Biography - A System In Which The Contradictions Of A Human Life Are Unified.

Life Is The External Text, The Burning Bush By The Edge Of The Path From Which God Speaks.

Hatred Is A Feeling Which Leads To The Extinction Of Values.

The Past Will Not Tell Us What We Ought To Do, But... What We Ought To Avoid.

We Fall In Love When Our Imagination Projects Nonexistent Perfection Upon Another Person. One Day, The Fantasy Evaporates And With It, Love Dies.

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Tragedy In The Theater Opens Our Eyes So That We Can Discover And Appreciate The Heroic In Reality.

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.

There Is But One Way Left To Save A Classic; To Give Up Revering Him And Use Him For Our Own Salvation.

The Metaphor Is Probably The Most Fertile Power Possessed By Man

The Truth Is That No Horizon Is Especially Interesting By Itself, By Virtue Of Its Peculiar Content, And That Any Horizon, Wide Or Narrow, Brilliant Or Dull, Varied Or Monotonous, May Possess An Interest Of Its Own Which Merely Requires A Vital Adjustment To Be Discovered.

Beliefs Constitute The Basic Stratum, That Which Lies Deepest, In The Architecture Of Our Life. By Them We Live, And By The Same Token We Rarely Think Of Them.... One May Symbolize The Individual Life As A Bank Of Issue. The Bank Lives On The Credit Of A Gold Reserve Which Is Rarely Seen, Which Lies At The Bottom Of Metal Coffers Hidden In The Vaults Of The Building. The Most Elementary Caution Will Suggest That From Time To Time The Effective Condition Of These Guaranties--of These Credences, One Might Say, That Are The Basis Of Credit--be Passed In Review.

I Am Free By Compulsion, Whether I Wish To Be Or Not.

He Who Wishes To Teach Us A Truth Should Not Tell It To Us, But Simply Suggest It With A Brief Gesture, A Gesture Which Starts An Ideal Trajectory In The Air Along Which We Glide Until We Find Ourselves At The Feet Of The New Truth.

These Are The Only Genuine Ideas, The Ideas Of The Shipwrecked. All The Rest Is Rhetoric, Posturing, Farce.

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.

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. All Our Faculties Keep Us Within The Realm Of The Real, Of What Is Already There. The Most We Can Do Is To Combine Things Or Break Them Up. The Metaphor Alone Furnishes An Escape; Between The Real Things, It Lets Emerge Imaginary Reefs, A Crop Of Floating Islands.

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.

There Are, Above All, Times In Which The Human Reality, Always Mobile, Accelerates, And Bursts Into Vertiginous Speeds. Our Time Is Such A One, For It Is Made Of Descent And Fall.

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Hating Someone Is Feeling Irritation By Their Mere Existence.

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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Commonplaces Are The Tramways Of Intellectual Transportation.

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Exaggeration Is

Man Is A Fugitive From Nature.

The Real Magic Wand Is The Child's Own Mind.

There Is No Doubt; Even A Rejection Can Be The Shadow Of A Caress”.

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Today Violence Is The Rhetoric Of The Period.

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The Choice Of A Point Of View Is The Initial Act Of A Culture.

A Fascinating Mystery Of Nature Is Manifested In The Universal Fact Of Hunting: The Inexorable Hierarchy Among Living Beings. Every Animal Is In A Relationship Of Superiority Or Inferiority With Regard To Every Other. Strict Equality Is Exceedingly Improbable And Anomalous.

The Hunter Who Accepts The Sporting Code Of Ethics Keeps His Commandments In The Greatest Solitude, With No Witness Or Audience Other Than The Sharp Peaks Of The Mountain, The Roaming Cloud, The Stern Oak, The Trembling Juniper, And The Passing Animal.

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The Common Man, Finding Himself In A World So Excellent, Technically And Socially, Believes It Has Been Produced By Nature, And Never Thinks Of The Personal Efforts Of Highly Endowed Individuals Which The Creation Of This New World Presupposed. Still Less Will He Admit The Notion That All These Facilities Still Require The Support Of Certain Difficult Human Virtues, The Least Failure Of Which Would Cause The Rapid Disappearance Of The Whole Magnificent Edifice.

The Hunter Is The Alert Man. But This Itself-life As Complete Alertness-is The Attitude In Which The Animal Exists In The Jungle.

To Live Is To Feel Oneself Lost.

The Hero's Will Is Not That Of His Ancestors Nor Of His Society, But His Own. This Will To Be Oneself Is Heroism.

We Need To Study The Whole Of History, Not To Fall Back Into It, But To See If We Can Escape From It.

The Will To Be Oneself Is Heroism

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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.

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Life Is A Struggle With Things To Maintain Itself Among Them. Concepts Are The Strategic Plan We Form In Answer To The Attack.

Life Is Fired At Us Point Blank.

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.

Love Is That Splendid Triggering Of Human Vitality The Supreme Activity Which Nature Affords Anyone For Going Out Of Himself Toward Someone Else.

The Type Of Human Being We Prefer Reveals The Contours Of Our Heart.

Rancor Is An Outpouring Of A Feeling Of Inferiority.

Living Is Nothing More Or Less Than Doing One Thing Instead Of Another.

Civilization Is Nothing More Than The Effort To Reduce The Use Of Force To The Last Resort.

Tell Me To What You Pay Attention And I Will Tell You Who You Are.

Barbarism Is The Absence Of Standards To Which Appeal Can Be Made.

Revolution Is Not The Uprising Against Preexisting Order, But The Setting Up Of A New Order Contradictory To The Traditional One

Liberalism... Is The Noblest Cry That Has Ever Resounded In This Planet.

The Surrealist Thinks He Has Outstripped The Whole Of Literary History When He Has Written (here A Word That There Is No Need To Write) Where Others Have Written "jasmines, Swans And Fauns." But What He Has Really Done Has Been Simply To Bring To Light Another Form Of Rhetoric Which Hitherto Lay Hidden In The Latrines.

Man Has To Live With The Body And Soul Which Have Fallen To Him By Chance.

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.

The Characteristic Of The Hour Is That The Commonplace Mind, Knowing Itself To Be Commonplace, Has The Assurance To Proclaim The Rights Of The Commonplace And To Impose Them Wherever It Will.

The Good Is, Like Nature, An Immense Landscape In Which Man Advances Through Centuries Of Exploration.

I Think That The Philosopher Must, For His Own Purposes, Carry Methodological Strictness To An Extreme When He Is Investigating And Pursuing His Truths, But When He Is Ready To Enunciate Them And Give Them Out, He Ought To Avoid The Cynical Skill With Which Some Scientists, Like A Hercules At The Fair, Amuse Themselves By Displaying To The Public The Biceps Of Their Technique.

Thought Is Not A Gift To Man But A Laborious, Precarious And Volatile Acquisition.

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.

It Is Not Obligatory For A Generation To Have Great Men.

The World Is The Sum-total Of Our Vital Possibilities.

The Preoccupation With What Should Be Is Estimable Only When The Respect For What Is Has Been Exhausted.

To Rule Is Not So Much A Question Of The Heavy Hand As The Firm Seat.

Liberalism -- It Is Well To Recall This Today -- Is The Supreme Form Of Generosity; It Is The Right Which The Majority Concedes To Minorities And Hence It Is The Noblest Cry That Has Ever Resounded In This Planet. It Announces The Determination To Share Existence With The Enemy; More Than That, With An Enemy Which Is Weak.

The Tapestry Of History That Seems So Full Of Tragedy When Viewed From The Front Has Countless Comic Scenes Woven Into Its Reverse Side. In Truth, Tragedy And Comedy Are The Twin Masks Of History - Its Mass Appeal.

All Life Is The Struggle, The Effort To Be Itself.

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.

We Cannot Put Off Living Until We Are Ready.

Inspirational Life

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.

An 'unemployed' Existence Is A Worse Negation Of Life Than Death Itself.

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.

Man Is A Substantial Emigrant On A Pilgrimage Of Being, And It Is Accordingly Meaningless To Set Limits To What He Is Capable Of Being.

Romantic Poses Aside, Let Us Recognize That "falling In Love"...is An Inferior State Of Mind, A Form Of Transitory Imbecility.

Falling In Love

I Am I Plus My Surroundings; And If I Do Not Preserve The Latter, I Do Not Preserve Myself.

Life, Individual Or Collective, Personal Or Historic, Is The One Entity In The Universe Whose Substance Is Compact Of Danger, Of Adventure. It Is, In The Strict Sense Of The Word, Drama. The Primary, Radical Meaning Of Life Appears When It Is Employed In The Sense Not Of Biology, But Of Biography. For The Very Strong Reason That The Whole Of Biology Is Quite Definitely Only A Chapter In Certain Biographies, It Is What Biologists Do In The Portion Of Their Lives Open To Biography.

When You Are Fed Up With The Troublesome Present, You Take Your Gun, Whistle For Your Dog, Go Out To The Mountain, And, Without Further Ado, Give Yourself The Pleasure During A Few Hours Or A Few Days Of Being "paleolithic."

The Form Most Contradictory To Human Life That Can Appear Among The Human Species Is The "self-satisfied Man."

Order Is Not Pressure Which Is Imposed On Society From Without, But An Equilibrium Which Is Set Up From Within.

Triumph Cannot Help Being Cruel.

In Their Choice Of Lovers Both The Male And The Female Reveal Their Essential Nature. The Type Of Human Being We Prefer Reveals The Contours Of Our Heart. Love Is An Impulse Which Springs From The Most Profound Depths Of Our Beings, And Upon Reaching The Visible Surface Of Life Carries With It An Alluvium Of Shells And Seaweed From The Inner Abyss. A Skilled Naturalist, By Filing These Materials, Can Reconstruct The Oceanic Depths From Which They Have Been Uprooted.

Nobility Is Defined By The Demands It Makes On Us - By Obligations, Not By Rights. Noblesse Oblige. 'to Live As One Likes Is Plebeian; The Noble Man Aspires To Order And Law.'

The Heart Of Man Does Not Tolerate An Absence Of The Excellent And Supreme.

Effort Is Only Effort When It Begins To Hurt.

The Person Portrayed And The Portrait Are Two Entirely Different Things.

An Idea Is A Putting Truth In Check-mate.

Civilization Is Nothing Else But The Attempt To Reduce Force To Being The Last Resort.

Towns Are Full Of People, Houses Full Of Tenants, Hotels Full Of Guests, Trains Full Of Travelers, Cafés Full Of Customers, Parks Full Of Promenaders, Consulting-rooms Of Famous Doctors Full Of Patients, Theatres Full Of Spectators, And Beaches Full Of Bathers. What Previously Was, In General, No Problem, Now Begins To Be An Everyday One, Namely, To Find Room.

Life Is A Series Of Collisions With The Future.

Life Means To Have Something Definite To Do-a Mission To Fulfill-and In The Measure In Which We Avoid Setting Our Life To Something, We Make It Empty. Human Life, By Its Very Nature, Has To Be Dedicated To Something.

And This Is The Simple Truth - That To Live Is To Feel Oneself Lost. He Who Accepts It Has Already Begun To Find Himself To Be On Firm Ground.

To Be Surprised, To Wonder, Is To Begin To Understand. This Is The Sport, The Luxury, Special To The Intellectual Man.

The Well Being Of Democracies Regardless Of Their Type And Status Is Dependent On One Small Technical Detail: The Right To Vote. Everything Else Is Secondary.

To Be Free Means To Be Lacking In Constitutive Identity...

Every Life Is, More Or Less, A Ruin Among Whose Debris We Have To Discover What The Person Ought To Have Been.

The Direction Of Society Has Been Taken Over By A Type Of Man Who Is Not Interested In The Principles Of Civilisation. Not Of This Or That Civilisation But From What We Can Judge Today Of Any Civilisation. The Type Of Man Dominant Today Is A Primitive One, A Naturmensch Rising Up In The Midst Of A Civilised World.

To Wonder Is To Begin To Understand.

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.

Imagine For A Moment That Each One Of Us Takes Only A Little More Care For Each Hour Of His Days, That He Demands In It A Little More Of Elegance And Intensity; Then, Multiplying All These Minute Pressures Toward The Perfecting And Deepening Of Each Life By All The Others, Calculate For Yourselves The Gigantic Enrichment, The Fabulous Ennobling Which This Process Would Create For Human Society.

In Our Rather Stupid Time, Hunting Is Belittled And Misunderstood, Many Refusing To See It For The Vital Vacation From The Human Condition That It Is, Or To Acknowledge That The Hunter Does Not Hunt In Order To Kill; On The Contrary, He Kills In Order To Have Hunted.

Man's Being Is Made Of Such Strange Stuff As To Be Partly Akin To Nature And Partly Not, At Once Natural And Extranatural, A Kind Of Ontological Centaur, Half Immersed In Nature, Half Transcending It.

The Poet Begins Where The Man Ends. The Man's Lot Is To Live His Human Life, The Poet's To Invent What Is Nonexistent.

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.

Whoever Has Not Felt The Danger Of Our Times Palpitating Under His Hand, Has Not Really Penetrated To The Vitals Of Destiny, He Has Merely Pricked The Surface.

Law Is Born From Despair Of Human Nature.

The Difficulties Which I Meet With In Order To Realize My Existence Are Precisely What Awaken And Mobilize My Activities, My Capacities.

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.

Man In A Word Has No Nature; What He Has... Is History.

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, But For Whom To Live Is To Be Every Moment What They Already Are, Without Imposing On Themselves Any Effort Towards Perfection, Mere Buoys That Float On The Waves.

Living Is A Constant Process Of Deciding What We Are Going To Do.

Thinking Is The Desire To Gain Reality By Means Of Ideas.

Poetry Has Become The Higher Algebra Of Metaphors.

Love Is Exclusivity, Selection.

With Morality We Correct The Mistakes Of Our Instincts, And With Love We Correct The Mistakes Of Our Morals.

Strictly Speaking, The Mass, As A Psychological Fact, Can Be Defined Without Waiting For Individuals To Appear In Mass Formation. In The Presence Of One Individual We Can Decide Whether He Is "mass" Or Not. The Mass Is All That Which Sets No Value On Itself Good Or Ill Based On Specific Grounds, But Which Feels Itself "just Like Everybody," And Nevertheless Is Not Concerned About It; Is, In Fact, Quite Happy To Feel Itself As One With Everybody Else.

Human Vitality Is So Exuberant That In The Sorriest Desert It Still Finds A Pretext For Glowing And Trembling.

This Fighting-shy Of Every Obligation Partly Explains The Phenomenon, Half Ridiculous, Half Disgraceful, Of The Setting-up In Our Days Of The Platform Of "youth" As Youth. ... In Comic Fashion People Call Themselves "young," Because They Have Heard That Youth Has More Rights Than Obligations, Since It Can Put Off The Fulfilment Of These Latter To The Greek Kalends Of Maturity. ...[t]he Astounding Thing At Present Is That These Take It As An Effective Right Precisely In Order To Claim For Themselves All Those Other Rights Which Only Belong To The Man Who Has Already Done Something.

In This Initial Illimitableness Of Possibilities That Characterizes One Who Has No Nature There Stands Out Only One Fixed, Pre-established, And Given Line By Which He May Chart His Course, Only One Limit: The Past.

Liberalism Is That Principle Of Political Rights, According To Which The Public Authority, In Spite Of Being All-powerful, Limits Itself And Attempts, Even At Ist Own Expense, To Leave Room In The State Over Which It Rules For Those To Live Who Neither Think Nor Feel As It Does, That Is To Say As Do The Stronger, The Majority.

There Are People Who So Arrange Their Lives That They Feed Themselves Only On Side Dishes.

The Assurance That We Have No Means Of Answering [final] Questions Is No Valid Excuse For Callousness Towards Them. The More Deeply Should We Feel, Down To The Roots Of Our Being, Their Pressure And Their Sting. Whose Hunger Has Ever Been [sated] With The Knowledge That He Could Not Eat?

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.

The Individual Point Of View Is The Only Point Of View From Which One Is Able To Look At The World In Its Truth.

History Is The Science Of People.

[i]t Is Necessary To Insist Upon This Extraordinary But Undeniable Fact: Experimental Science Has Progressed Thanks In Great Part To The Work Of Men Astoundingly Mediocre, And Even Less Than Mediocre. That Is To Say, Modern Science, The Root And Symbol Of Our Actual Civilization, Finds A Place For The Intellectually Commonplace Man And Allows Him To Work Therein With Success.

In These Years We Are Witnessing The Gigantic Spectacle Of Innumerable Human Lives Wandering About Lost In Their Own Labyrinths, Through Not Having Anything To Which To Give Themselves.

Being An Artist Means Ceasing To Take Seriously That Very Serious Person We Are When We Are Not An Artist.

Here, Then, Is The Point At Which I See The New Mission Of The Librarian Rise Up Incomparably Higher Than All Those Preceding. Up Until The Present, The Librarian Has Been Principally Occupied With The Book As A Thing, As A Material Object. From Now On He Must Give His Attention To The Book As A Living Function. He Must Become A Policeman, Master Of The Raging Book.

The Librarian's Mission Should Be, Not Like Up To Now, A Mere Handling Of The Book As An Object, But Rather A Know How (mise Au Point) Of The Book As A Vital Function.

I Am Myself And What Is Around Me, And If I Do Not Save It, It Shall Not Save Me.

The Mass Believes That It Has The Right To Impose And To Give Force Of Law To Notions Born In The Café.

The History Of The Roman Empire Is Also The History Of The Uprising Of The Empire Of The Masses, Who Absorb And Annul The Directing Minorities And Put Themselves In Their Place. Then, Also, Is Produced The Phenomenon Of Agglomeration, Of "the Full." For That Reason, As Spengler Has Very Well Observed, It Was Necessary, Just As In Our Day, To Construct Enormous Buildings. The Epoch Of The Masses Is The Epoch Of The Colossal.

I Have Always Thought That Clarity Is A Form Of Courtesy That The Philosopher Owes; Moreover, This Discipline Of Ours Considers It More Truly A Matter Of Honor Today Than Ever Before To Be Open To All Minds ... This Is Different From The Individual Sciences Which Increasingly [interpose] Between The Treasure Of Their Discoveries And The Curiosity Of The Profane The Tremendous Dragon Of Their Closed Terminology.

All We Are Given Is Possibilities — To Make Ourselves One Thing Or Another.

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