Quotes About Survival

Our sense of safety and stability in the world and our interpersonal relationships become undermined by childhood abuse because we carry these early thwarted—that is, deeply conflicted—survival patterns into adulthood.

I found that, if given appropriate guidance, human beings can and do shake off the effects of overwhelming events and return to their lives using exactly the same procedures that animals use.

Animals do not view freezing as a sign of inadequacy or weakness, nor should we.

If they have not trembled and breathed that way before they are released, they will not survive. They will die.

The highly regarded neurologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens, discovered that emotions literally have an anatomical mapping in the brain necessary for survival.4 That is to say the emotion of fear has a very specific neural circuitry etched in the brain corresponding to specific physical sensations from various parts of the body.

wild animal would following a frightful encounter with a predator. What ethologists call tonic immobility—the paralysis and physical/emotional shutdown that characterize the universal experience of helplessness in the face of mortal danger—comes to dominate the person's life and functioning.

We can turn our earth into a barren, lifeless minor star spinning in space, waterless, with little or no atmosphere, with not even cockroaches left on it. To face this possibility and still behave with decency; to still create beautiful things as though they will last forever; to still make music and poetry and paint pictures; to still consciously cultivate the gentler, tender side of ourselves is to aspire to a grace which makes us more than the animals we surely are.

Innocence is the currency. Survival is bought with innocence. You are born with an abundance of innocence and no knowledge of how to survive: you spend your life trading one for the other. But it only works one way. You can't buy back your innocence.

Loyalty cannot be too liberally insisted upon. Altruism in nature remains an exception. It poses a puzzle, being in prima facie conflict with the survival of the fittest and most selfish.

Best way to survive in the wilderness is stay warm and dry and fed and don't get lost, but you make those arrangements before you go there.

Peter Brandvold

She had all the best things wrong with her—incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She's so lucky.

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.

I do not wonder, and you will not either, that when Indians see their wives and children starving and their last source of supplies cut off, they go to war. And then we are sent out there to kill them. It is an outrage. All tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do—fight while they can. Our treatment of the Indian is an outrage.

We undervalue irrationality, I believe. It can protect us in hostile settings.

The fact is that we live on a rapidly aging planet, and we will soon have but two choices if our species is to survive: engineer on a planetary scale or get off.

Remember what we wrote? 'And just as I cannot imagine how I survived the past without you... I cannot imagine a future without you.' Remember? Well, I'm the future without her, buddy boy, and I can tell you right now that it's not something you're going to relish.

Life is a zoo in a jungle

If we want our species to survive in the long term, human beings cannot afford to stop reaching for the stars.

Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith doesn't work, but only that a certain kind of faith doesn't work—one that needs correct thinking in order to survive (chapter 6).

He stared at the broken gun, abhorrence glowing in his mind. "If we fail to stop them out in the provinces, then we will have to make similar guns just to survive. Can you imagine the carnage that will unleash on this world? The damage one man can wreak with such a gun multiplied a thousandfold.

But rocks falling on our heads can't happen anymore," Alik insisted. "We're not fucking dumbasses like the dinosaurs; we're here to stay. It's Darwin.

When they all gathered their breath and realized they were still alive, they saw the bullet. It floated motionless six inches in front of Edeard's face.

And he saved them. My son. Because of him, they will live, and have children, and laugh. But it hurts! That's because we're human, more so than Adamists can ever be. Our empathy means we can never hide from what we feel, and that's good.