These Survival quotes will inspire you. Survival, or the act of staying, is the tendency of something to continue to exist, especially when it is done despite circumstances that might kill or destroy it.
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re made of until you’re faced with a traumatic situation that you have to overcome. Celebrate your resilience with a collection of motivational and insightful survival quotes and sayings.
Inspirational Survival Quotes
- “We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” ~ John F. Kennedy, Survival quotes hard times
- “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “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
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“The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.” ~ Charles Darwin
- “A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.” ~ Stephen King
- “The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.” ~ Jane Wagner
- “Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.” ~ Bruce Lee
- “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.” ~ George Orwell
- “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” ~ Winston Churchill
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“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.” ~ Arnold J. Toynbee
- “I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.” ~ William Glasser
- “On the Internet, it’s survival of the easiest…. Give users a good experience and they’re apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But … it’s easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around.” ~ Jakob Nielsen
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“Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.” ~ Adlai E. Stevenson
- “Getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced
action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.” ~ Seamus Heaney - “To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.” ~ Wendell Berry
- “If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.” ~ Aristotle
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“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “Self-preservation is the first principle of our nature.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
- “Mother Nature is a relentless ruthless killer. She don’t give a damn if you get home to your family.” ~ Joe Teti
- “Without comedy as a defense mechanism, I wouldn’t be able to survive.” ~ Garry Shandling, Survival quotes comedy
- “A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles – whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled – is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing, and debilitating. If you create these ”anti-conditions,” your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years.” ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
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“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.” ~ George S. Patton
- “That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It’s such a powerful force.” ~ Danny Boyle
- “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk, Survival quotes time
- “People are all vulnerable in so many different ways. We go into survival mode a lot of times.” ~ Malin Akerman
- “The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.” ~ Mo Udall
- “The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.” ~ Herman Melville
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“If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way.” ~ Terry Goodkind
- “For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
- “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” ~ Thornton Wilder
- “Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.” ~ Martha Gellhorn
- “It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.” ~ Stephen Hawking
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“Survival is triumph enough.” ~ Harry Crews
- “Fear is good, for it makes us cautious and aids survival. Not so with terror. It is like slow poison, paralyzing the limbs and blurring the mind. . . Never, when in danger, ask yourself, What will they do to me? Instead think, What can I do to prevent them?” ~ David Gemmell
- “You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.” “Consciously, sir, consciously,” Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. “I hate them consciously.” ~ Joseph Heller, Survival quotes deep survival
- “It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.” ~ Meridel Le Sueur
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“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds – for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.” ~ Oliver Sacks
- “They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.” ~ Ann Brashares
- “Wolves are disciplined not only when they hunt but also when they travel, when they play, and when they eat. Nature doesn’t view discipline as a negative thing. Discipline is DNA. Discipline is survival.” ~ Cesar Millan, Survival quotes wolves
- “Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.” ~ Larry Harvey
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“Each delicately and fiercely imaged poem is a tribute to perseverence and survival and a lesson for us all.” ~ Walter Bargen
- “It feels good to know you contributed positively to another’s life, to their happiness, to their survival. It gives us a sense of purpose.” ~ Joy Bryant
- “The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It’s a survival game played under the glare of lights.” ~ Jean Chretien
- “Much female conversation is, in fact, about survival – but in code.” ~ Louise Bernikow
- “Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.” ~ Bill Cosby
- “Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.” ~ M. H. Abrams
- “If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would otherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really.” ~ Dennis Lehane
- “Just remember: Surviving is the best revenge, no matter what the disaster has been.” ~ Joan Rivers
- “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.” ~ Yann Martel
- “Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Love when you can, cry when you have to, be who you must, that’s a part of the plan. Await your arrival with simple survival, and one day we’ll all understand.” ~ Dan Fogelberg
- “It’s not the most powerful animal that survives. It’s the most efficient.” ~ Georges St-Pierre
