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.
I greet you from Smyrna together with the Churches of God present here with me. They comfort me in every way, both in body and soul. My chains, which I carry about on me for Jesus Christ, begging that I may happily make my way to God, exhort you: persevere in your concord and in you community prayers.
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.
Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
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