Quotes about survival

Every word was bought with pain, but that was the way of the world; a man must fight to live.

It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living.

Honor in safety, survival under threat. Necessity is the only law.

Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival.

Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.

Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions live in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought—it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude—it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness.

Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.

For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human.

Eagles had made a realist of him. He believed in facts, and in altering your viewpoint to fit them, no matter what they were. That was the way you survived and stayed sane; it was hard, it meant sacrifices—he had already lost many things that he valued deeply—but it was the only way.