Survival Quotes

It's important to have fun. Survival is more than making sure we have enough food and water.

~ Scott Cramer

I took to the Kingswood the midsummer after the Dame died. I did not swear a vow, but I kept to myself just as strictly, living like a beast in the forest from one midsummer to the next, without fire or iron or the taste of meat. I lived as prey, and I learned from the dogs how to run, from the hare how to hide in the bracken, and from the deer how to go hungry.In sorrow and pride I exiled myself to Kingswood. I shunned fire for I feared the kingsmen would hunt me down, and so by the way of cold and hunger I came near to refusing life itself. I never thought to anger or please a god by it.

~ Sarah Micklem

We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

~ Alice Sebold

The climber, like a fox which is hard-pressed, should always have one more trick in his bag.

~ Whipplesnaith

Do I think it was inherent nobility that brought us out here?” He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t call it nobility, though. I think it’s our innate human need to champion the underdog. We are constant optimists. We’re the emotional descendents of the caveman who stood defiant in the front of the wooly mammoth. We rebuild cities at the base of Vesuvius, get back on the bicycle when we fall off, whack that hornet’s nest every spring. Humans cheer for the couldn’t be, believe in the shouldn’t be. We love causes; the harder, the more lost they are, the more we love them. Is that nobility?Maybe. Maybe it’s a pernicious genetic defect that makes our species susceptible to shared delusion. Whatever it is, it keeps life interesting.

~ Cassandra Davis

Never diagnosed the enemy before.

~ Henry V. O'neil

It’s a lot cleaner when Command kills you on purpose . . . than when they do it by accident.

~ Henry V. O'neil

You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It’s important to have a philosophy of life . . . and of death.

~ Henry V. O'neil

I do care. That's why I hunt them. But if you've seen what I have, then you learn to deal with the murders and disappearances. You learn to push it aside and move on. The other life isn't here anymore. This new world has its own rules. Survival of the fittest is one of them. If you're hoping for kindness and pity, don't hold your breath.

~ Susanne Winnacker

I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But (...) we must see all scars as beauty. (...) Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

~ Chris Cleave

When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change.

~ Cameron Sinclair

You have to have an attitude that nothing's gonna stop me. I think that's just my New York kind of attitude - survival of the fittest.

~ Melissa De Sousa

Survival was my only hope, success my only revenge.

~ Patricia Cornwell

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

~ Wendell Berry

Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival.

~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

~ Tom Robbins

Humor can be one of our best survival tools.

~ Allen Klein

Humor - I see it as a survival skill.

~ Jill Mccorkle

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

~ Noam Chomsky

We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.

~ Virginia Satir

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

~ Lewis Thomas

As far as this business of solitary confinement goes, the most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it's only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up. It makes all the difference.

~ John Mccain

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

~ Michio Kaku

There was a period of time during the 'Jagged Little Pill' era where I don't think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.

~ Alanis Morissette

We have the capability - physically, technically - to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.

~ Rusty Schweickart

For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have failed.

~ Chris Evans

The will to work of everyone in the country is the best guarantee of national survival.

~ Bhumibol Adulyadej

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?

~ Solomon Short

We did everything we could to save my legs, and it just came to a point where if we didn't amputate my legs, I wouldn't survive. In that situation, you kind of go into survival mode, and you find strength.

~ Amy Purdy

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

~ Khalil Gibran

Am I a trance medium? No. Have I got a gift psychically? Absolutely not. But I believe in the survival of consciousness after death.

~ Dan Aykroyd

This generation has given up on growth. They're just hoping for survival.

~ Penelope Spheeris

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

~ Jimmy Carter

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

~ Paulo Coelho

It's hard to give up the self-esteem connected to being codependent and appearing 'right,' which is probably a survival behavior learned from growing up in a crazy family. It feels like you will actually disappear.

~ Melody Beattie

Since being quite young, I've had a very strong sense of independence and survival. As a child, I was on my own two feet emotionally.

~ Lena Headey

I don't think it's a Western thing to really talk about intrinsic motivation and the drive for autonomy, mastery and purpose. You have to not be struggling for survival. For people who don't know where their next meal is coming, notions of finding inner motivation are comical.

~ Daniel H. Pink

Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.

~ Aslan Maskhadov

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

~ Angela Davis

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

~ Doug Larson