Quotes About Survival

we two clinging to twigs of each other in the tide amazed our identities survive

Well first of all it's a business and it's a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that's getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.

A brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh

That Indian was stuck. From living in one place and eating the white man's food, he'd gotten weak. Flour, sugar, biscuits—none of that stuff can keep you going for long. You need meat in the winter, good fresh meat with plenty of fat on it. But there wasn't any meat around, at least not nearby. The white man had chased it away and the Indian, not being a hunter anymore, didn't have the strength to go any long distance for it.

So they locked me up," Danskin said. "I feigned madness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am." They rode in silence for a while. "But you're still pissed off." "Now more than ever.

Ingesting poison, fighting for food, being attacked by a larger rat or beaten with a toilet plunger: these are everyday rat dangers that make the life expectancy of the rat in the city approximately one year.

Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn't have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don't survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from above.

When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options. Rather they were vigorous, still diversifying into new orders and producing a variety of big-brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.

If you, reader, had been one of the hands, would you have slogged? Or would you have preferred to starve and see your family starve? If you had been in Crass's place, would you have resigned rather than do such dirty work?

to flee the shooting. After

On the ragged edge of the world I'll roam. And the home of the wolf will be my home.

I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend; Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out — yet the Wild must win in the end.

Any single guy who doesn't eat peanut butter is at risk of starvation.

This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the strong shall thrive;That surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive.Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,This is the Will of the Yukon—Lo, how she makes it plain!

Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

feelings are "false" or perhaps "illusory" if they lead the organism astray—

They will, on the one hand, have sex with just about anything that moves, given an easy chance, like males in a low-MPI species. On the other hand, when it comes to finding a female for a long-term joint venture, discretion makes sense; males can undertake only so many ventures over a lifetime, so the genes that the partner brings to the project—genes for robustness, brains, whatever—are worth scrutinizing. The

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

Natural selection cannot directly 'see' an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.

emotions are just evolution's executioners.

As a rule, two extremely different alternative traits will not both be preserved by natural selection. One or the other is usually at least slightly more conducive to genetic proliferation. However marginal its edge, it should win out, given enough time.

natural selection doesn't even care about our short-term happiness.

Todos los organismos, incluidos los seres humanos, han sido diseñados por la selección natural para reaccionar a su entorno en modos que conduzcan a una «mejora» (según los criterios de la propia selección natural) de las cosas, lo cual significa que, en mayor o menor medida, casi siempre estamos escudriñando el horizonte en busca de cosas que nos hagan infelices, que nos incomoden o que no nos satisfagan

However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from their point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism.