We all know what the word “survival” means but there are two different types of impressions we usually think about whenever we hear this word. Survival can be defined as someone, an organization, or an event that has continued to exist from the past up to the present. It describes something that continued to live in spite of all the difficulties and the challenges faced along the way. Some of the examples of survival: a single mother who raised her four children all by herself, a pilot who successfully landed the plane in a river and managed not to crash it, or a tourist who got stranded in the jungle but continued to live until he was found by a rescue unit. These are amazing stories of people who were able to survive even though the odds were against them.
We can consider the above definition and examples of survival as stories that show positive impact towards people. It lets us know that we can survive no matter what life throws our way. However, the negative effect of survival is when a person consciously settles on being able to survive rather than to thrive. Surely, we can all survive even if we don’t have much. We can still live even if we only eat two times a day, even if we don’t have a job and just beg for change, even if we live in a tiny little shack. But we have to remember that we can always do better. We have to work on getting a better education, food, job, clothing, shelter, and so much more. If we only live just to survive, we won’t be able to use our full potential. We are more than who we think we are.
These survival quotes we are giving you are wonderful words of encouragements as you go through your own journey in life. May you not just survive, but also thrive.
Survival Quotes
1. Most whales and dolphins be subjected to deafening noise that will cause more than 3.5 million instances of temporary and/or permanent hearing loss? For species that depend on hearing for survival, to find food, migrate, and communicate, any hearing loss could be catastrophic. As one scientist noted, a deaf whale is a dead whale. – Pierce Brosnan
2. When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change. – Cameron Sinclair
3. Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival. – David Perlmutter
4. Credibility is a basic survival tool. – Rebecca Solnit
5. The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth. – Rutherford B. Hayes
6. You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about. – Alice Walker
7. To be honest, if it wasn’t for my daughter, I don’t think I would have gotten out of the situation that I was in before ‘Idol’ because I am a domestic violence survivor. – La’Porsha Renae
8. I think I’m a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I’ve come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes. – Craig Venter
9. I’m a survivor, at least that’s what everyone tells me. – Courtney Love
10. My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that’s my stock. That’s how I want my kids to be too. – Michelle Pfeiffer
11. My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn’t really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor. – Nile Rodgers
12. The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity. – Alan Gregg
13. The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever. – Anne Frank
14. Survivors aren’t always the strongest; sometimes they’re the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest. – Carrie Ryan
15. The feat of surviving is directly related to the capacity of the survivor. – Claire Cameron
16. The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness. You can’t be a super spy, watchful and paranoid every day. But I am more watchful than the average American. – Barry Eisler
17. In the game of ‘Survivor,’ there is no time for regrets. – Jenna Morasca
18. I am someone who always gets up again, even if there are setbacks. I have a survivor instinct. I’m not sure where it comes from, but probably from all the little things that make you into who you are. – Heidi Klum
19. I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There’s this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don’t survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people. – Barbara Ehrenreich
20. We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome. – Isabel Allende
21. When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it’s easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival. – Dean Ornish
22. Survival can be summed up in three words, never give up. That’s the heart of it really. Just keep trying. – Bear Grylls
23. 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
24. Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. – Carl Sagan
25. We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. – Winston Churchill
26. The rules of survival never change, whether you’re in a desert or in an arena. – Bear Grylls
27. Connections with other people affect not only the quality of our lives but also our survival. – Dean Ornish
28. A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows. – Doug Larson
29. Sustainability is the key to our survival on this planet and will also determine success on all levels. – Shari Arison
30. The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dream. Hang in there. – James De La Vega
31. The human being is very resourceful. When you fight for survival, you don’t think much; you just do. If you think too much, you sink. – Frank Lowy
32. Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it. – Hunter S. Thompson
33. Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival. – W. Edwards Deming
34. 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
35. Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival. – Aung San Suu Kyi
36. Escapism is survival to me. – Johnny Depp
37. There are two problems for our species: survival nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. And we’re hurtling towards them, knowingly. – Noam Chomsky
38. 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
39. I do believe there’s a heaven. I do believe that God has given me the resilience and the survival skills to withstand the chiffon trenches. – Andre Leon Talley
40. Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior. – Stanislav Grof
41. In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you’re surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear. – Neil deGrasse Tyson
42. Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor. – Stephen Hawking
43. Survival is not about being fearless. It’s about making a decision, getting on and doing it, because I want to see my kids again, or whatever the reason might be. – Bear Grylls
44. Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older. – Hans Selye
45. The requirements for our evolution have changed. Survival is no longer sufficient. Our evolution now requires us to develop spiritually, to become emotionally aware and make responsible choices. It requires us to align ourselves with the values of the soul, harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for life. – Gary Zukav
46. 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
47. But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That’s what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it’s the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it. – Audre Lorde
48. It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships. – E. O. Wilson
49. As a Jew, it is my historic responsibility to defend the Jewish people. I feel this responsibility for the survival of the Jewish people. We’re not going to accept any decision by anybody else about the security of the State of Israel. It is our role and only our role. – Ariel Sharon
50. Living in a small town, one of the keys to survival was your imagination. – Nick Nolte
51. And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. – Andrew Carnegie
52. 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
53. Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards it’s No. 1 draft choices to the lowest ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team. – J. C. Watts
54. To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. – Wendell Berry
55. We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival. – Joan Halifax
56. Success is survival. – Leonard Cohen
57. In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival. – Luis Bunuel
58. Survival is nothing more than recovery. – Dianne Feinstein
59. It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzzword. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival. – Cameron Sinclair
60. The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. – Adrienne Rich
61. I have a hot memory, but I know I’ve forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival. – Iggy Pop
62. In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival. – Stanislav Grof
63. ‘A collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival. – Al Purdy
64. I used to walk to the Washington Monument from North L Street Northwest. And I was so hungry at times, I would stop and look into the trash cans, and if there was a half a sandwich, I would take that sandwich and eat it. It was just a matter of survival. I didn’t think much of it, but it was just the way things were. – Sugar Ray Leonard
65. Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender. – Henri Frederic Amiel
66. Our pleasures were simple, they included survival. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
67. Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge. – Todd Solondz
68. The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival. – Mo Udall
69. 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
70. I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods. – Margaret Atwood
71. Survival is triumph enough. – Harry Crews
72. The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool. – Jane Wagner
73. Survival requires us to leave our prejudices at home. It’s about doing whatever it takes and ultimately those with the biggest heart will win. – Bear Grylls
74. I do a lot of lectures on survival. I always say you can’t change what happened, so have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward. You can’t change what happened. – Joan Rivers
75. Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. – Louie Schwartzberg
76. Adaptability and constant innovation is key to the survival of any company operating in a competitive market. – Shiv Nadar
77. Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival. – Stephen Jay Gould
78. When I first read Anne Frank’s ‘Diary of a Young Girl,’ I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, through her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale. Fairy tales are brutal. – Kate Bernheimer
79. Instead of working for the survival of the fittest, we should be working for the survival of the wittiest. Then we can all die laughing. – Lily Tomlin
80. Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is no longer relevant and is counterproductive to our survival. – Jacque Fresco
81. Doesn’t the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes. – Imelda Marcos
82. Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. – Simon Wiesenthal
83. When you’re placed in a world where survival is the main focus, a lot of that other stuff, like wrongdoings in the past, become obsolete. You have to focus on the here and now. – Alycia Debnam-Carey
84. When you’re in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion. – Samuel Fuller
85. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. – Anita Roddick
86. Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow. – Lewis Thomas
87. A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest. – John McCarthy
88. I take nothing away from my existence in the ‘hood’, because it sharpened my instincts. We had a different way of living that developed our survival instincts, and I use those to this day when I make films. You can’t buy that. – F. Gary Gray
89. In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival. – Andrew Young
90. 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
91. Gossip, in its earlier forms, contained information that was critical to survival because, in clans of 150, what happened to anyone had a direct impact on everyone. – Peter Diamandis
92. Fear is always there; it’s a survival instinct. You just need to know how to manage it. – Jimmy Chin
93. Growing hemp as nature designed it is vital to our urgent need to reduce greenhouse gases and ensure the survival of our planet. – Jack Herer
94. Water, like many other resources, is harvested, transported and used throughout all aspects of society. Unlike other resources, water is critical to the survival of all forms of life. The underlying question that sits at the core of my exploration is to what degree can we shape water before it begins to shape us. – Edward Burtynsky
95. What prevails in every corner of this globalized world is the real struggle of our species for its own survival. – Fidel Castro
96. Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age. – Adlai E. Stevenson
97. For too long, the world has been focused on short-term growth and development at the expense of our long-term survival as we have depleted our natural resources at historically reckless rates. – Gisele Bundchen
98. Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being. – Ken Burns
99. I’m interested in how we react when we’re heavily pressed. When we’re vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave? – Paolo Bacigalupi
100. It’s hard to appreciate the importance of the rainforest because it seems so far away, but it’s vital to the survival of the planet as we know it. – Lily Cole
101. Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival. – Peter Benchley
102. I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. – Julian Barnes
103. My father so appropriately puts it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species. – Louise Leakey
104. My architecture is the architecture of survival. – Frei Otto
105. 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
106. I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent. – Susanna Kaysen
107. What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do. – Alan Watts
108. I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you. – Carrie Fisher
109. If you have to lie, cheat, steal, obstruct and bully to get your point across, it must not be a point capable of surviving on its own merits. – Steven Weber
110. I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn’t enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn’t prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food. – Frank McCourt
111. College is the reward for surviving high school. Most people have great fun stories from college and nightmare stories from high school. – Judd Apatow
112. It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. – Arthur C. Clarke
113. All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone. – Christian Lous Lange
114. Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do. – Stephen Hawking
115. Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it’s also a coping mechanism and a survival technique. – Monica Raymund
116. Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul. – Victor Hugo
117. When I’m ready to fight, my opponent has a better chance of surviving a forest fire wearing gasoline drawers. – Mr. T
118. The things that interest me are less to do with perhaps finding myself and more to do with surviving and mercy and forgiveness. – John Cameron Mitchell
119. All of the characters I’ve had the chance to create are survivors. But we live in a world where surviving makes up most of what we do. – Marion Cotillard
120. People start panicking because they think it’s the end of everything. But the fact is, you know, books survived movies; books survived TV. Books are surviving manga and anime. Books will always be there in one form or another. You just have a larger palette of entertainment options. – John Scalzi
121. The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality – not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate is the simplest and most straightforward, and the only one that fits all the facts. – Oliver Joseph Lodge
