Quotes about Survival

Man against Nature...Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.

If fight or flight is the choice, it's way easier to fly.

There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

For some, a lousy day's work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it's live or die.

The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.

The single most significant factor, he realized, was a sense of future vision—the impelling conviction of those who were to survive that they had a mission to perform, some important work left to do.1 Survivors of POW camps in Vietnam and elsewhere have reported similar experiences: a compelling, future-oriented vision is the primary force that kept many of them alive.

Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.