Best 1668 quotes in «survival quotes» category

One might say that there is an "ethics barrier " a speed above which ethics can no longer exit. After that point the only remaining goal is to survive the immediate moment.

One of the best ways you can fight discrimination is by taking good care of yourself. Your survival is not just important; it's an act of revolution.

One of the strangest things about this journey was how whenever a smuggler or a driver gave us an instruction, we simply followed it. Whether it was get in the car, stay silent, follow me, eat this, shave your beard, hand over your passport - we simply followed orders. Without questioning or really even thinking, we put our lives into the hands of strangers, time and again. We had no choice. When they said come, we little lost sheep had to follow. It's very hard to explain the feeling of repeatedly putting your complete trust into the hands of strangers who see you as a commodity. Every time I did as one of these men asked, I had an acute awareness that this could be the last instruction I would ever follow. Each of these men had the power to take us to our deaths, at any time.

One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic and above all survivors…we’re not that way from perversity, and we cannot just let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.

One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behavior.

Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.

Only the strong will remain, all the weak will be consumed by fire

Only those who are able to adapt to changing scenarios will continue to survive and prosper. Success is directly proportional to the degree of positive adaptation to change.

Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.

Only the wrong survive.

Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father's temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

On the door it says what to do to survive But we were not born to survive Only to live

On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars a s beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, ‘I survived’. In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them as we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means the storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvellous, and then she will turn round and smile.

Other than devastatingly sad, what else could be said about life, when life itself has been reduced to two main concerns for existence, how to make enough money to survive, and how do I make more money?

Our ability to transcend betrayal is directly tied to our willingness to identify ourselves as love activists rather than victims of the Universe.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

Our chances of survival were entirely dependent on our ability and willingness to dominate others.

Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas. Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses' hooves sank into them. The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, billboards that once screamed ads for the casinos were now stripped of their promises of penny slots and large jackpots. The raw boards underneath were exposed, like showgirls without their makeup. Some signs had been blown over completely and lay half-buried under mounds of sand, like sleeping animals. Cars dotted the highway, their paint scoured off and dead tumbleweeds caught underneath them. Their windows were fogged with death, and despite my effort not to look, my eyes were drawn to the blurred images of the still forms inside. I tried to concentrate on the dark road ahead of us instead.

Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

Our obsession with scarcity makes us take for granted the very things that our survival depends on—air, water, climate, food, safety or even relationships. It’s only when something critically important becomes scarce and hence expensive that the human mind begins to acknowledge its value.

Outside, the dogs whine over the wind. They sense the wolves - they sense the wild. It calls to them, like it calls to me, and I wonder sometimes if we are the only ones who hear it.

Our REM sleep in 90-minute bursts, in a 24 hour cycle "digests" trauma that is experienced on a daily basis. In dreaming, the brain compares the trauma with early memory traces of similar experience, and files the memories of the day's events according to an affect-based associative system for further use and potential survival value. Comforting figures may appear in the dream to give care, advice, counsel, and relief, if necessary. The nightly dream process helps the dreamer receive positive resolution of his or her experience, and the dreamer moves on to the next day's activities restored, refreshed, and prepared for survival-based action.

Outside he hurried again, for he had several blocks to walk and the beer turned out to be no more than cool. He told himself he would remember next time to deal from the bottom - but the civil sirens sounded, surprising him with his silly private thought. That's what they blow them for. Thought is a national product, issued, like survival, on a day to day basis. There you go. Until tomorrow. When he understood this would be a long one today, he hurried on.

Outside, I clicked the padlock back in place, sealing the butterflies within. It seemed remarkable that they'd survived in there for so long in such fruitless and insubstantial conditions. But as I walked back up the drive to the front of the house, I thought about Jake and me, and I realized that was just what happens. The butterflies didn't have a choice, after all. That's what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.

Parents have many weapons at their disposal, but only one has the power to destroy anyone or anything in its path. A solider has a rifle. A Jedi has a light saber. A parent has an umbrella stroller.

Partial skinning may be less painful, perhaps delay unpleasantness, how pain set in breasts, back, and belly offers less agony, some reprieve, while the skinning of fingers, nose, cheeks and lips feels like spears. . .

Part of the forces that sent Sam trudging across the white prairies was love of life, a gladness for health and youth that filled him as Mozart's gayest music filled him; and part of it was his belief that the earth on which he walked had been designed by the greatest of artists, and that is a man had the courage and fortitude not to fail it, it would not fail him. In Sam's rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator. If it was a part of the inscrutable plan that he was to live through this ordeal, and again cover the bones of wife and child with mountain lilies, the strength was lying in him, waiting, and he had only to call on it- all of it- and use it, without flinching or whimpering. If he showed himself to be a worthy piece in the Great Architect's edifice he would live; in Sam's philosophy that was about all there was to it.

Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other’s knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.

Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.

Passion is...it's fire. And fire is great, man. But we're made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.

Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.

Patient endurance is the greatest life survival skills.

[Patricia Highsmith] had experienced at first hand many of Ripley's characteristics - splintered identity, insecurity, inferiority, obsession with an object of adoration, and the violence that springs from repression. Like her young anti-hero, she knew that in order to survive, it was necessary to prop oneself up with a psychological fantasy of one's own making. 'Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination,' she wrote in her notebook while writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. 'Existence is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.

People and birds were alike. Things happened that hurt them or made their lives harder. All the time. But losing someone or something important didn't mean the end of everything. It meant you had to find a new way to do things.

People open bookstores because they want their souls back. (from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.

People say that scars are the sign of victory; the winning marks against what broke them. But how about the wound that never heals? What would that make you? A winner, a loser, a survivor?

People tend to think that money makes them strong, but it's those that learn to survive without it, are truly the stronger.

People talk about fight or flight? That's nonsense. It's fight and flight.

People who live in the luxury of a steady paycheck and food in their bellies get too caught up in right and wrong, moral and immoral, good and bad, heroes and villains, even truth and lies. As if we're all either one or the other. As if we all have a choice. As if I have a choice. But I don't believe in choices. I believe in survival.

People who have so much of their personality invested in the Internet can’t really survive as whole individuals without it.

Perhaps the only happily ever after is to survive to tell the story

Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.

Perseverance, endurance and patience are the three greatest survival skills.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

Perhaps there are times when your life is so unbearably miserable, and yet the only part of you that can run away from it and leave is your mind.

Power hungry=life loving

Powerless=lifeless.

Please challenge me because whenever I am challenged, I learn a way to survive and a brilliant technique to fight.

Politicians know it's a game of power, every politician at every level, even in the common of mortals.