Best 73 quotes in «self preservation quotes» category

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

I am an extremely sincere individual. I am sincere, to a fault. One of the many things that I have come to realize, to learn, is that sincerity must be reserved and given only to those who deserve it. And one must save one's emotions, channeling them only to the people who are worthy of it. One must not throw one's pearls to the pigs.

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.

Certains ont l’air honnête, mais quand ils te serrent la main, tu as intérêt à recompter tes doigts. Some may look honest, but when you shake their hand, you had better count your fingers.

I do not need to set myself on fire to keep other people warm.

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

I felt blank dismay, instant fear for myself. I did not want to be involved in any mess of Priscilla's. I did not even want to have to be sorry for Priscilla.

In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we've believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can't possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.

How many men have asked you to marry them?' 'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.

It dawns on you one day... how precious your life is and how not okay it is for anyone, ever, to cause you any amount of suffering, ever. Then the next time you step out the door you look at everyone and you’re thinking, “My life is precious and you’re not allowed to hurt me.

It is that we are afraid, that we look to love. It is when we love, that we become afraid.

Man's strongest instinct is not sex or self-preservation. it's to level the playing field.

Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.

Maybe I'm starting to think like Han. I don't feel quite right about this situation. I'm more nervous than usual.' Han eyed Chewie, who whuffled softly. Yeah, maybe she was picking up a sense of self-preservation. Skywalkers seemed to be born without it.

Maybe that's why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn't resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language that she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.

Now the situation could be resolved, and we could put this behind us -- both the awkward misunderstandings and the misguided attempts at self-preservation. Though both of those would probably happen in the future anyway.

In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.

Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.

People have a tendency of filtering their memories – exaggerate the positives and downplay their weaknesses and faults. Self-preservation will be another obstacle you will have to surmount when it comes to suppressed memories.

...in my own perilous position, and above all, in the remarkable game that I saw Silver now engaged upon-keeping the mutineers together with one hand, and grasping, with the other, after every means, possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life.

Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.” He turned and started wading into the swamp. “Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns.

Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.

Secrets and lies… Everyone in the world deals with these every day of their lives. To protect themselves. To protect someone else. It is all in the way that you look at the situation.

Self-preservation is as important as generosity. Because if you don't preserve yourself, keep enough for yourself, then of course you have nothing to give.

She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

She didn’t dare expose her heart the way she’d exposed her body.

She's Devine. She's Magic. And she didn't have to wait for anyone to tell her in order for her to believe that about herself. And that's what made her so magically beautiful.

She seems to always get it To have become adept at empathy Always giving excuses for people who’ve aggrieved her To the point it’s hard for her to hit back when necessary All because she assumes she ‘understands’ Then, one day . . . She finally stands up for herself At that moment, she revels in the natural instinct of self-preservation She realises all this while the power she’s been withholding In a transcendent moment of epiphany It’s all beautiful ‘cause Now, she can get back to empathy with understanding, rather, than without.

So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness - self-preservation of an uglier stripe. And thus did they harden themselves, by choosing to meet hate with hate.

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

Terrorism has no face, but the general mind instinctively attempts to put a face on it based on internally as well as externally predominant biases and knowledge. And the mind does so in the pursuit of self-preservation, because putting a face on an act of terrorism, increases the chances of survival. Once the mind has successfully put a face on terrorism, it tries to avoid intimacy with all the faces that come from similar cultural background. This entire mental process takes place driven by the biological drive for survival. Does this mean that we are biologically bound to act like phobics and racists! And the answer is - we have indeed inherited certain biopsychological drives from our primitive ancestors, but later in our evolutionary history, we also developed the mental capacity to override those primitive traits.

The fundamental basis by which the court’s decision might be made is, in itself, imperfect and subject to contradictions. There is very little consideration given to a priori knowledge regarding the circumstances being presented and as a result, arguments must be made empirically, under the assumption that assumptions themselves are, in fact, likely to give way to specious reasoning...Decisions must be made meticulously and according to specific, yet immeasurable criteria that can only be further manipulated by any cunning lawyer with the ability to make emotional pleas based on a requisite amount of inconsequential evidence to affect a decision beneficial to his clients. And so, in this respect, the law is capable of proving nothing except that its absurd attention to detail is really a kind of a façade meant to cover up the fact that a truly logical and just way to deal with such matters has not yet been devised. And the absence of adequate definition to its principles has given way to a kind of apathy among the men employed by the courts, who want nothing more now than to make a living for themselves and their families and not work themselves into too much of a frenzy about how little can be changed through their own initiative. Thus things aren’t likely to.

... that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves...

That level of responsibility drastically conflicts with my belief in self-preservation by inactivity.

On all of us was forced life; and, on almost all of us, the desire to remain alive.

The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.

There are only three things you can do when something falls from the sky,' my archdruid used to say. 'Get out of the way, get underneath some shelter, or give it some reason to change its mind about falling on you.' Then he threw a pissed-off rooster at me.

The older we get, the more picky we become about the expenditure of our energies. The older we become, the more we ask ourselves "Is this person worth the energy? The time?" And, "Is this situation worth this kind of energy and time?" We become choosy about who and what we spend energy on. We allow ourselves to be freed from the people and the things that simply don't deserve our life force. The older we get, the more we realise how precious our life force is and how much we ought to guard it, and keep ourselves wrapped inside the kind of energies that serve our purpose.

The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us.

There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop.

There's a fine line between self-preservation and mummification.

The religion I am talking about here is plain everyday humanism. That’s exactly what the person named Jesus attempted to spread, but due to innate psychological reasons, his pupils ended up constructing yet another orthodox circle with its own distinct beliefs, ideals and fantasies.

Those who cannot dance, should not dance.

Truly caring people know they have to take care of themselves first.

You can release people and still love them.

We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)

When we perceive danger or a threat, and we need to act instantaneously, instinct kicks in. Instinct is the master of self-preservation. It is primal.

When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.