Quotes About Survival

human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts. - Ravissante

The Buddha challenged the idea of an immutable soul. He said nothing about the mutable soul, and its survival, though his successors in most streams of Buddhism have had a lot to say on this subject. For all their words, the question of what happens when one dies remains a mystery.

Wisdom and love have nothing to do with one another. Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You're wise if you don't stick your finger in the light plug. Love -- you'll stick your finger in anything.

All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn't even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

I was living in the cheapest of all paper houses, living as the Japanese themselves do, on a handful of rice, and learning by experience how very little it requires to keep body and soul together.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

So often the end of a love affair is death by a thousand cuts, so often its survival is life by a thousand stitches.

People are resilient. After all, every person born has recovered from nine months on life support.

A true sportsman is a hunter lost in the woods and out of ammo.

Rats!They fought the dogs and killed the cats,And bit the babies in the cradles,And ate the cheeses out of the vats,And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles.

People usually lived or died of dumb luck. Not because something mystical cares.

Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside. Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.

But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds. Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.

Every man for himself, his own ends, the Devil for all.

Every man for himself, the devil for all.

We must work hard at overcoming the natural tendency to see causal connections and other patterns where there are none by examining all the evidence, not just the data that support our gut feeling. Critical thinking, skepticism, and science did not evolve on the savannah millions of years ago. They are unnatural and go against the grain of those instincts that helped our species survive for hundreds of thousands of years.

An almost infinite diversity of structures compete against the environment.

You can't really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

We call people rats, who desert a sinking ship; but in some cases the rat has the wisdom of the situation.

In the work environment the stakes are suddenly raised. People are no longer struggling for good grades or social approval, but for survival. Under such pressure, they reveal qualities of their characters that they normally try to conceal. They manipulate, compete, and think of themselves first. We are blindsided by this behavior and our emotions are churned up even more than before, locking us into the Naïve Perspective.