What separates Hemingway's statement from mere stoicism is the distinction he draws between two different kinds of loss. Destruction speaks to circumstance—the body broken, the fortune lost, the plans undone—while defeat is something interior, a capitulation of the spirit that no external force can truly impose. A man watching his business collapse might be destroyed by events, yet remain undefeated if he refuses the corrosive bitterness that would follow. That's why we remember Santiago wrestling his marlin in the shattered boat: ruined in every practical sense, he triumphs because he never accepts the fiction that losing a fight means losing himself.