Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the human ability to adjust to all circumstances, whether favorable or unfavorable.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset suggests that adaptability is an intrinsic quality of humans, allowing them to cope with the diverse experiences of lifeβboth positive and negative. This resilience highlights our capacity for growth and survival in different situations, reflecting on the duality of existence where we must learn to navigate through both challenges and successes.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of being adaptable.
"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.
I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
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.
The heavenly motions... are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.
This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?
Maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. I realized that the white page is a magic box. Ultimately, the mistery box is all of us. Ubiquitous technologies. What comes next ? Mystery as catalyst for imagination.
You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.
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