Self-Preservation Instinct Quotes

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

That knave preserves the pearl in his purse who considers all people purse-cuts.

Self-preservation is the first responsibility.

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

If you hold yourself dear, protect yourself well.

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.

The private interest of the individual would not be sufficiently provided for by reasonable and cool self-love alone; therefore the appetites and passions are placed within as a guard and further security, without which it would not be taken due care of.

Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.

I thought, better to get out while I'm still alive.

If you can't save your own life, is it even worth saving?

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.

Politicians have an acutely honed instinct for self-preservation.

When you go down a dark alley and you feel that tingling across the back of your neck, that's not just a bad feeling, that's a biological gift from God - the Gift of Fear...when you ignore that gift - when you go down the dark alley and say, Y'know, I'm sure it'll be okay - that's when you find real pain.

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.

it taught me, that when a woman lets herself love, she loses. it taught me that to survive, you rely on yourself first and last." -adrianne "It should have also taught you that sometimes love has no threshold." -philip

Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation.

You have to get away from them. You have to get as far away as you can otherwise they'll kill you with their lives. They don't know what they do. They are careless with themselves and they take too much for granted. They make their shortcomings your problem. The only way to keep your head above it and heal your wounds is to crawl away.