Quotes About Self-preservation

My four years of high school were spent locked up inside "el campo." I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.

None of us offered to shake hands. There was no advantage to letting somebody get hold of you.

Every man for himself, the devil for all.

Preserve the unspoken option of being able to leave at any moment and reclaim your freedom if the side you are allied with starts to collapse.

Be like a slippery ball that cannot be held: Let no one know what gets to you, or where your weaknesses lie.

Remember: You have only so much energy and so much time. Every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength.

Most important of all, do not take pity. Do not enmesh yourself in trying to help. The infector will remain unchanged, but you will be unhinged.

We have learned to limit our emotions to such an extent that we won't let others in and we can't get out. We invest an inordinate amount of time and energy maintaining a façade, an image to hide behind.

A young wolfhound must meet his first wolf someday, but if the wolf sees him as a puppy, if he acts the puppy, the wolf will surely kill him. The wolfhound must be a wolfhound in the wolf's eyes even more than in his own, if he is to survive.

Man is the only animal species capable of conceiving the notion of his own disappearance, and the only one capable of the despair that notion brings. What a strange race: so savagely determined to destroy itself, so savagely intent on preserving itself.

A person never finds himself a total coward, because if something frightens him he runs just far enough away to consider himself a hero again!

You know if we've got anything about us that hurts we shrink from anyone's touch on or near it. It holds good with our souls as well as our bodies, I reckon. Leslie's soul must be near raw - it's no wonder she hides it away.

He jumped into the pond to drown himself once and then changed his mind and swum out again. Wasn't that like a man?

Try now, try now, it isn't too late' ... Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn't too late, I thought confusedly, neither it is too early: I haven't much time left to spoil. It was the last flicker of instinct of self-preservation which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall.

Por eso hay que permanecer alejados de personas que tengan un aliento gélido. Su sola presencia podría apagar el fuego más intenso, con los resultados que ya conocemos. Mientras más distancia tomemos de estas personas, será más fácil protegernos de su soplo.

That's why it's important to keep your distance from people who have frigid breath. Just their presence can put out the most intense fire, with results we're familiar with. If we stay a good distance away from those people, it's easier to protect ourselves from being extinguished.

it's perhaps better for a prince to learn young that looking before one steps is basic self-preservation.

Thinking that you can't protect the ones you love, you have to hope they're smart enough to save themselves.

Hell no. You're what saved you, kid. Not divine intervention.

What do you do when you know you are breaking someone's heart, but to do anything else would break your own?

It would be nice if you'd stop almost killing me because you don't want to screw other peo­ple.

If I went in the cage, I was going to end up eaten alive. That was actually one of my top five ways not to die...

I never want to put my whole world in any one person's hands again, Jason. If they die, I won't die with them.' 'So you'll hold a little of yourself back from everybody.' 'No,' I said, 'I'll hold back a piece of myself for myself. No one gets all of me, Jason, no one, except me.

You can't save everybody. In fact, there are days when I think you can't save anyone. Each person has to save himself first, then you can move in and help.