Quotes About Survival

Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.

You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world? Do you know that men are sometimes banished for life? Do you know that men sometimes lose all their yams and even their children? I had six wives once. I have none now except that young girl who knows not her right from her left. Do you know how many children I have buried—children I begot in my youth and strength? Twenty-two. I did not hang myself, and I am still alive.

A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride.

We have a saying that a toad does not run in the day unless something is after it.

El mundo está cambiando ?le había dicho?. No me gusta, pero soy como el pájaro eneke-nti-oba, que cuando sus amigos le preguntaron por que volaba a todas horas respondió: Los hombres de hoy han aprendido a disparar sin errar y por eso yo he aprendido a volar sin posarme en las ramas.

Un corazón orgulloso puede sobrevivir a un fracaso general, porque ese fracaso no afecta a su orgullo.

Puisque j'ai survécu à cette année-là, disait-il toujours, je survivrai à n'importe quoi.

The question now is, can we survive ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human?

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey In

Endure. In enduring, grow strong.

I am a raft of secrets, she thought, and she imagined herself on timbers from a shipwreck, the water around her endless in all directions.

As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat." "You're selling yourself short." "I've just sold myself for rat meat," she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

Understandably, our Darwinian bodies and primitive brains are not going to catch up with this astonishing state of affairs. We live, in this new safety, in this new time of plenty, like drunken sailors freshly delivered from terrible peril.

We used it every winter, and in every time of drought or famine. We survived by getting depressed. Not clinically depressed, or Prozac depressed, but survival depressed, as in let's slow down the metabolism, build up the fat stores, withdraw, turn inward, hibernate, cut everything back to bare minimum. Shut down and survive by letting all but the most critical systems atrophy and decay. In fact, all chronic stress works the same way.

All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless.

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

If you speak to anyone who's ever done time, the fact that you make it out of there alive is a miracle.

I think I've almost killed myself 1,000 times eating some sandwich as fast as I possibly could and almost choking. It's a miracle that I'm still alive.

Misery is a match that never goes out.

People in Russia adapt to misery by a deep, deep humor.

I always felt that I had a mission in life. I thought I was born to play sports. Even now, I still feel that must have been my mission because I came through so many close calls where my life could very easily have been ended.

I think some people are on a mission to die, and I never was.