The quote in The Old and the Sea, "A man can be destroyed but not defeated," is just one of those quotes that jumps off the page as you are reading. It is one of the quotes that will make you put the book down for a while and think about what you have just read. It had that kind of effect on me. I love the alliteration used in "destroyed" and "defeated" to add to the tone. I love that it uses words with just subtle differences in their meaning but antithesis is utilized to contrast the two. The quote is meant to make the reader think about whether the old man is being defeated or destroyed or whether the marlin he caught is being defeated or destroyed. This short quote basically explains in one sentence what this story meant to me. It goes back to the man versus nature and man versus man conflict I have mentioned when talking about this novella. An important theme of this novel is how far a man can oppose nature before he is defeated. He says that man is not made for defeat which we are not. We are intelligent beings unlike a fish, although a fish the size of a marlin may be able to physically destroy us. In the novel, Santiago was badly beaten by the marlin. His hand was so badly wounded that he will never fish again, but he killed this fish regardless of how much respected this creature. It was due to his pride in himself that he would not let this fish go when he fought with it while out at sea fishing. In the end, I believe that the old man was destroyed, not defeated. And the fish got the best of both worlds when it was destroyed by the sharks and defeated by the old man.