Self Preservation Quotes - Page 3

• Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.

  Joe Abercrombie

  Fear, Men, Air

  6 Copy quote

• Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Men, Self, Doe

  10 Copy quote

• Shall Nature, erring from her first command, self-preservation, fall by her own hand?

  George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne

  Suicide, Fall, Self

  4 Copy quote

• If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Lying, Cocky, Squares

  4 Copy quote

• It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.

  Alexander Herzen

  Passion, Character, Self

  6 Copy quote

• I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

  Julian Barnes

  Self, Survival, Instinct

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.42, Random House

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

  Rosamond Lehmann

  Self, Poetry, Important

  Rosamond Lehmann (1975). “The ballad and the source”, Harvest Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

  Louis Sullivan

  Mean, Sacrifice, Men

  5 Copy quote

• You have to realize there is nothing more you can do to convince someone you love to turn their life around. You simply have to say, "Look. I love you, but I cannot stand by and watch you kill yourself slowly. When you want help I'm here. Until then, goodbye." That may sound cruel, but self-preservation is paramount to helping someone else. If you're a wreck, you're useless to them, anyway. And if they refuse help, despite knowing the likely outcome, they will head down that path anyway.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Goodbye, Love You, Self

  Source: monsterlibrarian.com

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Self, Expression

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.36, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Self, Church

  26 Copy quote

• The danger of Iran is if you listen to what the Ayatollah is saying, to what the Mullahs are saying, rational self-preservation is not their objective. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon the odds are unacceptably high that that weapon will not be simply stockpiled, but it will be detonated over Tel Aviv, or New York, or Los Angeles.

  Ted Cruz

  New York, Odds, Self

  4 Copy quote

• This is partly a function of approval ratings. People pay attention [to polls] and start saying, 'Lets take a more independent tack.' It is frankly self-interest, self-preservation.

  John Thune

  Independent, Approval Rating, Self

  4 Copy quote

• The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Self, Law, Foundation

  J M Coetzee (2015). “Diary of a Bad Year”, p.17, Random House

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men unless they are its own Otherwise it shuts me up.

  Max Stirner

  Men, Self, Police

  53 Copy quote

• The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge.

  Peter Sloterdijk

  Country, Reality, Thinking

  "Critique of Cynical Reason". Book by Peter Sloterdijk, 1983.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

  Jodi Picoult

  Mean, Past, Self

  Jodi Picoult (2013). “The Storyteller”, p.369, Simon and Schuster

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Business, Self, Emulation

  The Theory of the Leisure Class ch. 5 (1899)

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

  Ross Douthat

  Self, Political, Islam

  9 Copy quote

• My inner wolf seeks to destroy the one I love for reasons of self-preservation. For the only cure to free my soul is to be killed, in an act of true love, by the one who loves me most.

  Bree Despain

  True Love, Self, Soul

  Bree Despain (2009). “The Dark Divine”, p.247, Carolrhoda Lab ™

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

  Isak Dinesen

  Country, Writing, Self

  4 Copy quote

• Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Mean, Passion, Heart

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2009). “Emile: Or, On Education”, p.384, The Floating Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

  John R. Rickford

  Self, Appreciate, Soul

  8 Copy quote

• Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.

  Walpola Rahula

  Children, Ignorance, Men

  13 Copy quote

• He who governs himself according to what he calls his principles may be punished either by one party or the other for those very principles. He who proceeds without principle, as chance, timidity, or self-preservation directs, will not perhaps fare better; but he will be less blamed.

  J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

  Party, Self, Punishment

  29 Copy quote