logo

Quotes About Survival

We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.
~ Julian Barnes
And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come.
~ Julian Barnes
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
~ Julian Barnes
Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.
~ Julian Barnes
For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age...The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.
~ Julian Barnes
Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived. At
~ Julian Barnes
I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.
~ Julian Barnes
If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. —
~ Julian Barnes
He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
~ Julian Barnes
His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.
~ Julian Barnes
Samo oni koji vide šta ?e se dogoditi prežive, mora da je to pravilo.
~ Julian Barnes
Let others argue about that; his only concern was to get to the end of each day. He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.
~ Julian Barnes
they continued under the same roof, with good days and bad weeks, swallowed rage, occasional outbursts and increasing social isolation. All this no longer made him feel interesting; instead, he felt a failure and an outcast.
~ Julian Barnes
hace excavar una pequeña fosa para Gustave. Sorprendentemente, el niño sobrevive. Resulta ser un crío tardo, que se pasa tranquilamente horas y horas sentado con el dedo en la boca y una expresión «casi idiota» en el rostro. Para Sartre, es «el idiota de la familia». 1836 Comienza
~ Julian Barnes
Those who survive, or excel, or overmaster are merely those who are better organised and wave bigger guns; those who are better at killing.
~ Julian Barnes
The French had the more pragmatic approach: you married for social position, for money or property, for the perpetuation of family, but not for love. Love rarely survived marriage, and it was a foolish hypocrisy to pretend that it might.
~ Julian Barnes
And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
~ Julian Barnes
I survived. "He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
~ Julian Barnes
I always doubt people... I've survived by not believing in other human beings.
~ Julianna Baggott
And I knew that I loved him with more than a nod. I loved him with a rush of tenderness, a lion's share. (Is that ever enough?) I wanted to survive. I had to. I never called.
~ Julianna Baggott
Dad was not a religious man, and he once said to me that he didn't think he would believe in God at all were it not for the existence of two things: trees — and man's conscience. He said that without trees, we would not survive on this planet, for they feed us, clothe us, shelter us, make oxygen. Without a conscience, man would probably never have developed beyond a primitive state.
~ Julie Andrews Edwards
Rhys told himself that everything came with a price. He'd made a difficult choice years ago to regain all he had, and some days he could convince himself that life was like war: bitter, desperate choices were often made in the name of survival, and some inevitably survived at the expense of others.
~ Julie Anne Long
He had looked into the barrel of enemy rifles, the slavering jaws of a furious bear, the lifeless faces of his father and brother. He could build a home from the stripped timbers on up, shoot to kill nearly anything, expertly hold a newborn baby. He figured he'd been tested in more ways than Hercules, and in the end he supposed he was grateful that the war had sorted the entirety of his life into two categories for him: what was worth living for, what was worth dying for.
~ Julie Anne Long
I just want the pain to end.
~ Julie Anne Peters