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We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Love often begins as an idealized fantasy of perfection, which eventually fades, leading to the end of that love.

This quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset highlights the nature of love as often rooted in fantasy rather than reality. It suggests that we initially fall in love when we project an image of perfection onto another person, creating an illusion that is ultimately unsustainable; when the reality of that person is revealed, the fantasy evaporates, leading to the dissolution of love itself.

Themes

LoveImaginationPerfectionFantasyReality

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a relationship workshop to discuss the idealization of partners.

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Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
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"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.
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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.
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I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
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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.
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We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
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