Quotes About Survival

I have never seen sheep kill sheep, but wolves? We have civil unrest in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, Occupied Judea…everywhere. Where the creed of the wolf thrives, everyone dies. The sheep are not the only ones dying—the wolves eat the sheep, but they are also killing each other without mercy.

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

Art gives charm and beauty to terrible things. That is the power and its glory. It is hard for us to accept the truth that art is doom - a harsh doom for the artist who survives in his art but not as a living human.

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, we'll go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.

The plum survives its poems.

Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.

That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.

A batter'd, wreck'd old man,Thrown on this savage shore, far from home,Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken'd and nigh to death,I take my way along the island's edge,Venting a heavy heart.

Each delicately and fiercely imaged poem is a tribute to perseverance and survival and a lesson for us all.

In his great act of humility and washing, he broke with all the models of humanity that are visible in our own time and place: the rat race of productivity, the fear for survival, the frenzy of accumulation, and the deathly sense of self-sufficiency.

They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can't kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.

You need luck to keep going. It takes more than skill to stay alive.

The children of this world were dedicated to surviving this life by whatever method possible. I, too, must be totally dedicated, but with an added dimension. I must not seek to avoid hardships or to soften their impact. I must see in them the will of God and through them work out my salvation.

One man had been completely submerged in the boiling liquid which inundated the cabin, and in his removal to the deck, the skin had separated from the entire surface of his body. The unfortunate wretch was literally boiled alive, yet although his flesh parted from his bones, and his agonies were most intense, he survived and retained all his consciousness for several hours.

It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

There is only the single imperative, Survive this Moment. The past scarcely matters; the future will be dealt with, instant by instant, as it arrives. Each tick of the clock, a new burden, a new application of the imperative.

The night was a magnificent confirmation of "women and children first," yet somehow the loss rate was higher for Third Class children than First Class men.

Try and get off with Major Butt

Warum tötest du mich nicht?" fragte der Bücherjäger. "Du solltest eigentlich wissen", antwortete Homunkoloss, "daß es immer einen geben muß, der überlebt, damit er die Geschichte erzählen kann. Denn sonst gäbe es bald keine Geschichten mehr, um die Bücher zu füllen.

If he survived Roaming Rock, he kept telling himself, death would have lost its sting.

Wer einmal gelernt hat, in der Melancholie zu Hause zu sein, der kann es selbst in der schlechtesten aller Welten aushalten. Gute Lektüre, schwarzen Humor und gesunde, gut abgehangene Melancholie, mehr braucht man eigentlich nicht.

Hier unten existierte dieses Riesenreich voll mit unschätzbarem Wissen, und es war in der Hand von Mördern und Banditen, wilden Tieren, Ratten und Insekten, die es besinnungslos herunterwirtschafteten, unbewohnbar machten und eines Tages endgültig zerstören würden.