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.
All of the incessant debate about development assistance, and whether the rich are doing enough to help the poor, actually concerns less than 1% of rich world income. The effort required of the rich is indeed so slight that to do less is to announce brazenly to a large part of the world: 'You count for nothing.' We should not be surprised, then, if in later years the rich reap the whirlwind of that heartless response.
You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.
But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.
Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.
The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people β eternal life.
For Star Trek proves, as faulty as individual episodes could be, is that the much-maligned common man and common woman has an enormous hunger for brotherhood. They are ready for the twenty-third century now, and they are light-years ahead of their petty governments and their visionless leaders.
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