Quotes about survival

A man could change, if only to survive.

All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

I was sure that Lys was dead. I wanted myself to die, and yet I clung to life—useless and hopeless and harrowing a thing as it had become. I clung to life because some ancient, reptilian forbear had clung to life and transmitted to me through the ages the most powerful motive that guided his minute brain—the motive of self-preservation.

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival.

“Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza.

“Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.”

As for carrying a gun for the whiteman, well, a time will come when you too will know that every man in the world is alone, and fights alone, to live.”

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

Don’t do anything to make things worse was the eleventh commandment of the ghetto, at least as important as the original ten.

Sex was pleasurable, sure, but survival was sweeter still.

“From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

They say survival is Nature’s only form of flattery.

The heritage we give our children, and the myths we leave to sustain them, must work with the tug and press of life, or they will fail. Adaptability has to be enshrined alongside stability, or the ghost of Darwin will surely come back to haunt us, whispering in our ears the penalty of conceit.

We wish our descendants happiness. But over time one criterion alone will judge our efforts.

Survival.