Quotes About Self-preservation

My view is that to get anywhere in life you have to be anti-social. Otherwise you'll end up being devoured.

It is OK to be a little selfish about my priorities.

A crisis is said to resemble a sharp fruit knife. It removes the peel and exposes the core: the amorphous, largely instinct-governed primordial state in which morality is dominated by self-preservation

We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it.

Suave qui peut —let those who can save themselves save themselves.

She'd only become a monster to take care of herself in a monstrous business. Underneath she was a neurotic woman, deeply afraid and uncertain of everything except her own genius. - Frank Capra on Bette Davis

I never ask no questions, I never speak my mind. I've always found that silence helps to keep me and my kind alive ...' Judas Priest

boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.

The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves.

She knew enough to take a few steps back from the relationship when things got particularly combustive.

Not that he had anything to worry about. Personally, Sissy would like to avoid having acid thrown in her face. She was wacky that way.

I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don't know if those two things can both be true, but that's how it was.

When Chong made to sit down next to her, Lilah drew her knife and stabbed the point into the earth between them. "I can see that you need some quiet time," he said and scuttled quickly away.

Most of the time, our fight is all about saving us from ourselves.

Would she never learn not to trust any man—at least not with her emotions?

sometimes we have no choice but to be selfish if we are to . . . survive" Excerpt From Someone to Hold

She found his coldness and his anger easier to cope with than the melancholy and near tenderness that drink had induced in him that night. It had taken all her willpower in the hours following the ball not to allow the reserve she had built around herself in six years to crumble away. But she had held on and would continue to do so, perhaps, if she could just stay away from him.

She must not let him ruin the tranquility of her life again. She would not let him do so!

She really did not care. Not anymore. It was safer not to care.

The memory of his treachery would harden her against her own heart.

I don't mean you should despise people for being weak, if it's a kind of weakness they can't help. But when they're weak on purpose, it's another thing. When they don't even try. When they let people hurt them and don't fight back. It's gross. It's letting down the whole human race.

determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.

Don't get too close to

We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.