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Art
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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.
-Jos
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Books
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There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
-Jos
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Chaos
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In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
-Jos
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Conservation
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I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
-Jos
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-Jos, Meditations in Quixote
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Conviction
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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.
-Jos
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Creation
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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.
-Jos
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Creativity
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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.
-Jos
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Cynicism
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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.
-Jos
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Difficulty
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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.
-Jos
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Discontent
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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.
-Jos
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Effort
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Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.
-Jos
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Excellence
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Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.
-Jos
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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.
-Jos
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Genius
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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.
-Jos
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Goodness
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The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
-Jos
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Government
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To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.
-Jos
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Ideas
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An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
-Jos
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Inferiority
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Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.
-Jos
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Legacy
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Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-Jos
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Liberalism
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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.
-Jos
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Life
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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.
-Jos
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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.
-Jos
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Loss
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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.
-Jos
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Masses
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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 caf
-Jos
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Books by and about Jos