Quotes About Survival

the second force that encourages behavioral addiction: the drive for social approval. As Adam Alter writes: "We're social beings who can't ever completely ignore what other people think of us."18 This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it.

your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible.

This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions.

A cornered animal is almost as dangerous as a wounded one.

Faye guessed she was seeing images in her mind. The sort of images you had to live with for the rest of your life, like war wounds, but in your heart rather than on your skin.

It fascinated him that the human will to survive was so strong that despite the complete absence of any quality of life, one still chose to go on, day after day, year after year. Was there any cause for rejoicing left in a life like Anders Nilsson's? Did he ever experience the emotions that made life worth living: joy, anticipation, happiness, elation? Or was everything merely a stop on the way to the next shot of alcohol?

Forgive Olof? When he had robbed them of their childhood, turned them into adults who clung to each other like victims of a shipwreck? He was the driving force behind everything they had done, everything they still were doing.

Life had caught up with her, run her down, and left her aching all over by the side of the road.

He had lost almost everything, and nothing was as dangerous as a person who had nothing more to lose.

But together she and Gustav seemed even weaker than they did individually. If they hadn't joined forces against the threat that Ruben represented, which had held them together like glue all these years, Vivi knew they never would have survived.

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Scratch a female inmate, I've discovered, and you'll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men.

you've spent so much of your life in emotional survival mode. Of course you have a hole. Anyone would. We all live with holes of some kind or another, and we spend our lives trying to fill them—so quit fighting it.

In my fairy- tale ending, we would have both survived the war and called it a miracle, but it seems that triumph in life is infinitely more subtle. I am damaged from the war, but I'm not broken. My heart is, at times, lonely, but I am still loved. Life was never meant to be as perfect as I had supposed; rather we are to adapt, make our best choices, and then live with the consequences, learning that it will all be okay.

Neta crawled out of the wreckage, hoping against hope that Amelia wasn't hurt. She wasn't. She was standing next to the plane, grinning and powdering her nose. "We have to look nice [if] reporters arrive," she said.

In its intense and remorseless competition for every available nutrient, the Amazon offered little just for the taking.

What has survived of Garfield, however, is far more powerful than a portrait, a statue, or even the fragment of his spine that tells the tragic story of his assassination. The horror and senselessness of his death, and the wasted promise of his life, brought tremendous change to the country he loved - change that, had it come earlier, almost certainly would have spared his life.

General Robert Baden-Powell, later founder of the Boy Scouts, drastically cut African rations in an attempt to spare not just his own men but any white civilians trapped in the town with them. His plan was to starve the native population until they were forced to break out of the besieged city in search of food, thus reducing the number of mouths to feed.

Roosevelt, still wearing his heavy, hobnailed boots, watched as the snake's short fangs plunged into the tough leather and spilled its venom down the side of his boot. He had been spared an agonizing, certain death by a quarter-inch of leather.

Even had Garfield simply been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below and behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger to the president. Nature did all she could to restore him to health, a surgeon would write just a few years later. She caused a capsule of thick, strong, fibrous tissue to be formed around the bullet, completely walling it off from the rest of the body, and rendering it entirely harmless.

The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.

Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though

She was beginning to realize people could survive most things. Not because thy were brave or strong, but because there wasn't any choice.