What is food to one man is bitter poison to others.
Interpretation
Different experiences and perceptions shape our views on what is good or bad.
This quote by Lucretius emphasizes the subjectivity of human experience. It suggests that what one person finds nourishing and fulfilling, another may find harmful or detrimental. This highlights the importance of perspective and individual differences in taste and perception, reminding us that our judgments about life can vary greatly based on personal experiences.
In practice
In a debate about diet and health, one might use this quote to emphasize how different foods affect people differently.
Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.
No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.
The water hollows out the stone, not by force but drop by drop.
Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.
Many animals even now spring out of the soil, Coalescing from the rains and the heat of the sun. Small wonder, then, if more and bigger creatures, Full-formed, arose from the new young earth and sky. The breed, for instance, of the dappled birds Shucked off their eggshells in the springtime, as Crickets in summer will slip their slight cocoons All by themselves, and search for food and life. Earth gave you, then, the first of mortal kinds, For all the fields were soaked with warmth and moisture.
So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.
No man can attain to the knowledge of God but by humility. The way to mount high is to descend.
Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we βmustβ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement
There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.
This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.
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