Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that some people live superficially, focusing only on the less important aspects of life.
In this quote, Jose Ortega Y Gasset implies that many individuals structure their lives in a way that they only pursue minor or trivial pleasures, neglecting the more substantial and fulfilling experiences that life has to offer. This metaphor of 'side dishes' highlights a lifestyle that may be filled with distractions and superficial joys, ultimately leading to a lack of fulfillment and meaning.
In practice
In a motivational talk about living fully and not settling for less.
Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
"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.
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be.
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?
At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
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