Quotes About Survival

There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. 'Nou led, nou la,' it says. 'We are ugly, but we are here.' Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all odds, we exist.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven

When you write it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoin daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

the key to survival is the ability of the "host" to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components.

If lack of self-regulation is the essential characteristic of organisms that are destructive, it is the presence of self-regulatory capacity that is critical to the health, survival, and evolution of an organism or an organization.

There are always three factors involved in survival, no matter how toxic the environment. One is the physical reality; the second is dumb luck; and the third is the response of the organism, which can often modify the influence of the first two. The relationship of these three factors can be imagined as dials on an amplifier, with survival depending on the overall mix.

All could see the holly now bristling green. From every cut and wound and point from which a parted limb had gone, a hundred prickly, scorning tongues.

The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.

Sometimes you just have to hold on, to keep doing what you're doing, to have faith that things are going to get better. It's how we survive. There've been a million bottlenecks in history where things would have turned out much worse if we'd all just given up and accepted the inevitable. Some of those bottlenecks would have ended us if a few irrational, doggedly optimistic souls hadn't clung to a thread of hope

we live to fight another day

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

I had survived a long war with the Mob and the government. I told myself I was not going to be defeated by a couple hack writers and a Mafia rat.

I don't know the weapons that will be used in the Third World War, but in the Forth men will use wood and stones

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

I don't know [what weapons will be used in the Third World War]. But I can tell you what they'll use in the Fourth — rocks!

Human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

By the fall of 1918, it was clear that a nation's prosperity, even its very survival, depended on securing a safe, abundant supply of cheap oil.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Let not harsh tongues, that wag in vain, Discourage you. In spite of pain, Be like the cactus, which through rain, And storm, and thunder, can remain. —"Be Like the Cactus", a poem by Kimii Nagata

For this is the considerate way of dogs; and of cats as well. When dire sickness smites them, they do not hang about, craving sympathy and calling for endless attention. All they want is to get out of the way,—well out of the way, into the woods and swamps and mountains; where they may wrestle with their life-or-death problem in their own primitive manner; and where, if need be, they may die alone and peacefully, without troubling anyone else.

If you had had to live in the backwoods as I did – in the days when backwoods were really backwoods," answered his father. "you'd know that a deer is the deadliest and most dangerous brute anywhere in this part of the country. They've got soft eyes and they're nice to look at. But they're devils, at heart, every one of them. I'd rather take my chances with a wounded bear than with a wounded deer. Any expert hunter would.