Quotessence
Home / Topics / Self Preservation Quotes

Self Preservation Quotes

Browse 203 quotes about Self Preservation.

Related topics

Self Preservation Quotes

“Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.”

“As you go about your daily life, you will encounter many lemons. Sour expressions, sour attitudes, sour auras! The good thing is that if you don't want to be a lemon, you don't have to be! Just don't let those lemons rub themselves all over you! And you don't even have to save them! Let lemons be lemons! One of the most important things that I have ever learned, is that I don't have to save people.”

“I saw with colourless interest that the rocks of the basin ... were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter now? ... Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.”

“Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. And it's very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something... ...that's been fifty years ago, as I said, and since that time I've never been afraid of anything or anybody because I'd known the worst that could happen to me. And that lack of fear has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of happiness. God intended women to be timid and frightened creatures and there's something unnatural about a woman who isn't afraid... Scarlett, always save something to fear - even as you save something to love...”

“No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish.”

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.”

“Terrorism has no face, but the general mind instinctively attempts to put a face on it based on internally as well as externally predominant biases and knowledge. And the mind does so in the pursuit of self-preservation, because putting a face on an act of terrorism, increases the chances of survival. Once the mind has successfully put a face on terrorism, it tries to avoid intimacy with all the faces that come from similar cultural background. This entire mental process takes place driven by the biological drive for survival. Does this mean that we are biologically bound to act like phobics and racists! And the answer is - we have indeed inherited certain biopsychological drives from our primitive ancestors, but later in our evolutionary history, we also developed the mental capacity to override those primitive traits.”

“The religion I am talking about here is plain everyday humanism. That’s exactly what the person named Jesus attempted to spread, but due to innate psychological reasons, his pupils ended up constructing yet another orthodox circle with its own distinct beliefs, ideals and fantasies.”

“What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.”

“A destructive or creative state of psychological madness must trace itself to a source. By finding the source of their misery, a person might be able to corral the crazy desire prematurely to terminate their existence. An old saying suggests that self-hatred is the central cause of all self-destructive actions. Self-hate might consist of anger that we harbor towards other people who maltreated us. Repressed anger and pent-up hostility that we retain against other people that has no viable direct escape hatch can reflect and turn inward against ourselves. Perhaps we regret that we allowed other people to demean us, or rue that we lacked a protective level of self-esteem to begin with.”

“You're not going to want to see him. Not tonight, Sorrengail.' Garrick warns with a grimace. 'Self-preservation is a thing. Notice we're not with him, and we're his best friends.' 'Yeah, well, I'm his...' I open my mouth and shut it a few times because... fuck if I know what I am to him. But the longing that holds my heart hostage, this driving need to be at his side because I know he's suffering, no matter if it means throwing myself headfirst into uncertainty... I can't deny what he is to me. I kick off the leather slippers of my dress uniform- they're more of a hazard than anything, and in this wind? Well, we'll see how it goes. 'I'm just... his.”

“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)”

“Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.”

“She seems to always get it To have become adept at empathy Always giving excuses for people who’ve aggrieved her To the point it’s hard for her to hit back when necessary All because she assumes she ‘understands’ Then, one day . . . She finally stands up for herself At that moment, she revels in the natural instinct of self-preservation She realises all this while the power she’s been withholding In a transcendent moment of epiphany It’s all beautiful ‘cause Now, she can get back to empathy with understanding, rather, than without.”

“In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.”

“Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.”

“According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be.”

“When we are asked to act, we do so only if we feel at least minimally competent to do what is asked of us. We need to feel that our actions will ultimately be successful. Without some expectation of success, we are unlikely to act at all and will rather resign ourselves to letting fate take its course. We often redirect our thinking from our actual goals to the goal of preserving a sense of our competence. This act of self-protection is essential to maintaining a minimum capacity to act.”

“Why is it that people are always trying to kill you?' His voice was low, on the edge of something deadly. 'You need to be more careful.' 'How is this my fault?' 'You have no sense of self-preservation.' Archer took another angry step. 'If someone labelled a bottle poison, you would drink it. You take warnings as invitations. You can seem to stay away from all the things that will hurt you.' Like me.”