Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the interconnectedness between the self and the environment, suggesting that neglecting one can lead to the downfall of the other.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset's quote highlights the idea that our identity and well-being are deeply rooted in our surroundings. It suggests that taking responsibility for our environment is crucial, as neglecting it can lead to a deterioration of both the individual and the collective. The quote serves as a reminder of the reciprocal relationship between self and society, urging individuals to engage with and preserve their surroundings.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about environmental conservation.
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
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.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.
Every single person in this world is a minority in one way or another. It just depends on how you slice the pie.
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.
Again I ask whence it happened that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in eternal death so many nations, together with their infant children, except because it so seemed good to God? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true.
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