Quotes About Survival

At times, I felt like the fisherman in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, sharks gnawing at my catch as I tried to tow it to shore. But as the weeks passed, the core of our reforms survived the amendment process remarkably intact.

He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shoes, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas – survival, and freedom, and hope.

Then Elie spoke, describing how in 1945—paradoxically—he had emerged from the camp feeling hopeful about the future. Hopeful, he said, because he assumed that the world had surely learned once and for all that hatred was useless and racism stupid and "the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

The work remained arduous and sometimes monotonous, made tougher by the need to patch leaks and bail water. Maintaining speed and course in the constantly shifting winds and currents required patience, skill, and attention. But for a span of time, we had in us the thankfulness of survivors, propelled in our daily tasks by a renewed belief that we might make it to port after all.

the only thing that's the end of the world is the end of the world.

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

los empresarios confiaban en que el pensamiento positivo aplacara a las víctimas de las reestructuraciones y fomentara en los supervivientes las ganas de hacer un esfuerzo aún más heroico.

En 2004, un estudio puso de manifiesto que el optimismo no aportaba beneficio alguno, en términos de supervivencia, a los que sufrían cáncer de pulmón

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy—or to transmit it—is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.

I lost a child, she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.

God hates us, I said. Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants. They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive? When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. 'We're like coyotes,' he said. 'Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.

She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.