Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the rapid changes and challenges of human existence in our current times.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset's quote highlights the dynamic nature of human reality, suggesting that we live in an era characterized by swift changes and a sense of decline. It speaks to the common experience of feeling overwhelmed by the pace of modern life and the existential reflections that arise from such conditions, urging individuals to recognize the transient and often tumultuous nature of existence.
In practice
During a lecture on modern life, you could use this quote to illustrate the rapid pace of societal change.
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.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.
Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
The rain falls upon the just And also on the unjust fellas But mostly it falls upon the just Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas
Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.
Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
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