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.
While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance.
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.
In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.
I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.
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