Jose Ortega y Gasset

“When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle your dog, and go out on the mountain”. – From Meditations on Hunting, 1972

 

“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, in the laws of nature”. – From Meditations on Hunting, 1972

 

“In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted”. – From Meditations on Hunting, 1972

 

“The hunter is the alert man. But this itself—life as complete alertness—is the attitude in which the animal exists in the jungle. ”

 

A Journal of Wild Game, Fighting Fish, and Grand Pursuit