93 Inspiring Survival Quotes

In life's unpredictable journey, resilience and survival often come to the forefront as essential traits. Whether you're navigating personal challenges, facing the elements, or simply seeking strength through words, a powerful quote can offer the inspiration needed to persevere. This collection of 93 inspiring survival quotes draws from the wisdom of those who have faced adversity head-on and emerged stronger. Through their words, you may find the motivation and encouragement to continue on your own path, no matter how daunting the road ahead might seem. Join us as we explore these profound reflections on endurance and the human spirit.

1. “and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive” - Audre Lorde

2. “The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.” - Joseph Heller

3. “You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.” - Edwin Louis Cole

4. “If quick, I survive.If not quick, I am lost.This is "death.” - Sun Tzu

5. “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” - Albert Camus

6. “Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.” - Jim Butcher

7. “The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

8. “I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day."(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)” - Gail Carriger

9. “What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.” - Terry Brooks

10. “...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.” - Kevin Brockmeier

11. “All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.” - Yann Martel

12. “Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything” - Lance Armstrong

13. “In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives. . . .” - Stephen King

14. “Even in its darkest passages, the heart is unconquerable. It is important that the body survives, but it is more meaningful that the human spirit prevails.” - Dave Pelzer

15. “They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.” - Ian Fleming

16. “A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.” - Chris Cleave

17. “I would rather live than die. I would rather die than survive as a monster.” - Robert Fanney

18. “The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.” - Laurence Gonzales

19. “Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.” - Wade Davis

20. “My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.” - John Marsden

21. “Law is made by the winner to preserve victory over the loser.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

22. “Loving someone always requires you to not love others.” - Koushun Takami

23. “We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.” - José Ortega y Gasset

24. “I believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations.” - Ace Frehley

25. “What could I offer the local bad boy except my livelihood? Oh, I know. My body or my planes! Why didn't I think of that? Would you have preferred that I offer him my body, Nic, because I sure as hell wasn't going to sign over either of my planes!” - Sharon K. Garner

26. “Listen up, Nic," she said firmly, looking straight into his gray-blue eyes. "If you die on me out here, so help me I'll hold seances and pester you. I won't give you a moment's peace in the hereafter," she threatened in a fierce whisper. Gabrielle O'Hara, River of Dreams” - Sharon K. Garner

27. “We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves," he used to say. That doesn't make sense. 'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision.” - David Wroblewski

28. “For the first time in his existence, he knew he was drowning and he wasn't thinking about survival.” - Christine Feehan

29. “Fear is the venom impact of predator sting, causing prey not to be focus on the survival.” - Toba Beta

30. “Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.” - Joan D. Vinge

31. “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” - Carl Sagan

32. “Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.” - Ayn Rand

33. “I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.” - Orson Scott Card

34. “I remembered my little brother, Allyn, had appeared so innocent and angelic when he slept--similar to Kerrick. It must be a survival tactic. If Allyn hadn't looked so sweet, we would have killed him while he slept. He had been pure evil when he was awake--similar to Kerrick.” - Maria V. Snyder

35. “La supervivencia no es cuestión de cortesía ni de disculpas.” - Stephen King, Gerald's Game

36. “Everyone judges constantly: positively judging one person is the same as negatively judging everyone else; it is to say that that person is superior in some sense.” - Criss Jami

37. “If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.” - Megan Whalen Turner

38. “Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.” - Lawrence N. Powell

39. “I have no language to paint the horrors of our situation. To shed tears was indeed altogether unavailing and withal unmanly yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me.” - Owen Chase

40. “Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my feet " He nodded. "I just hope that lasts." "It will Catkin it will. It wouldn't dare fail you.” - Julia Golding

41. “Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.” - Tahir Shah

42. “You never know what will save you.” - Abbey Wilson

43. “Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.” - Richard Adams

44. “‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.” - David Attenborough

45. “Life made you get your hands dirty; life was vengeful if you tried an easy route.” - Meghan Ciana Doidge

46. “For no matter how many battles had been won or lost, no matter how many friends and soldiers killed, every battle felt like the first. And I realized that it wasn't the training, nor the pain of seeing friends die, nor the will to win that made the men fight, but their will to survive that made them soldiers.” - Magus Guidan

47. “Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.” - Anne Stevenson

48. “Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.” - Yann Martel

49. “Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.” - Cody Lundin

50. “See, they say it’s ‘survival of the fittest’, but you and I really know that it’s ‘survival of the most heavily armed” - Lia Habel

51. “Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will."...You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said...."Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?” - Jennifer Egan

52. “We each survive in our own way.” - Sarah J. Maas

53. “Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.” - Frank Herbert

54. “It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

55. “Bad things can happen, and often do--but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages.” - James A. Owen

56. “Bellusdeo laughed. It was, for a moment, the only sound in the quiet of the fief’s night, and it was warmer and deeper than the lingering night chill. When her laughter faded, she glanced at Kaylin. “I was not like this before. I thought that the Shadows had not touched me.” She lowered her head a moment.Kaylin understood this, as well. “It seems so unfair,” she finally said.“Life is unfair. Which part of it pains you?”“We suffer, and it breaks something. When we win free—by gaining our name, by crossing a bloody bridge—we still live in a cage of scars. If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we’re still reacting to things that don’t exist anymore.”“But they did.”“Yes. I hate that they still define me.” Voice lower, she said to Bellusdeo, “I want that to change. I don’t know how to change it. But I’m willing to spend the rest of my life trying.” Shaking her head, she forced herself to smile; it was surprisingly easy. There was something about Bellusdeo that she liked. “Home is a strange thing.”“What do you mean?”“We lose it, and we think it’s gone forever. That’s how I felt the first time I lost mine. It took me years to understand that I could find—and make—another. I couldn’t do it on my own, though; I don’t think—for me—home exists in isolation.” - Michelle Sagara West

57. “We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.” - Alice Sebold

58. “As long as it’s an every man for himself kind of world, men will always be for themselves. - Mayor Bentley in 'Tilt” - Ashley Chappell

59. “Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.” - Marilynne Robinson

60. “[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.” - Blaine Harden

61. “Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.” - Scott McCloud

62. “No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.” - Sarah J. Maas

63. “Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God.” - Louis Zamperini

64. “It is not what happens to you that matters; it is how you feel about it that does.” - Shannon L. Alder

65. “I’m a survivor. And like the moon, I have a feeling it would take a truly spectacular event to keep me from taking my place in the scheme of things, waxing, waning, and eclipsing notwithstanding.” - Janet Rebhan

66. “The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.” - Hunter S. Thompson

67. “I used to murder people for money, but these days it’s more of a survival technique.” - Jennifer Estep

68. “My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.” - Rachel Hartman

69. “Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.” - Yann Martel

70. “Whenever there is love beyond boundaries .... Whenever trust flows deeper than oceans .... Nevertheless, a Trial is born .... You pass that trial, sacred you shall be .... if you don't, your are immortal !!!!” - M.W.Latif

71. “Bad bloods aren't born evil or dangerous. We are taught to be, but only because we have to if we want to survive.” - Shannon A Thompson

72. “Now, because we have spent so many years convincing the younger people that we are helpless, they believe that we are no longer of use to this world.” - Velma Wallis

73. “The climber, like a fox which is hard-pressed, should always have one more trick in his bag.” - Whipplesnaith

74. “We never surrendered. We always kept in our hearts the most noble, beautiful feeling that sets human beings apart: hope.” - Manel Loureiro

75. “Some trees are too deeply rooted to move … And if they are uprooted, they will die…” - Jocelyn Murray

76. “You just do it, then if you die, you die.” - T. Scott McLeod

77. “She was beginning to realize people could survive most things. Not because thy were brave or strong, but because there wasn't any choice.” - Candice Proctor

78. “I just didn't want to be a loser anymore...-Mitsuko Souma” - Koushun Takami

79. “Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species.” - Eric Chaisson

80. “There is no pride when it comes to survival, only determination.” - Anthony Liccione

81. “We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.” - Lemony Snicket

82. “Ah, but when one predator leaves, another inevitably will take its place. A void never remains a void for long.” - A.T. Baron

83. “War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.” - Aminatta Forna

84. “Willpower survives.” - Toba Beta

85. “I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.” - Jeanette Winterson

86. “I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.” - Tim Kreider

87. “Stop worrying about life, no one survived it.” - A.J. Shazad

88. “Flexibility is a requirement for survival.” - Roger Von Oech

89. “After we deal and heal...NOT A A SHRED OF EVIDENCE EXISTS THAT LIFE IS SERIOUS.....Jan Marshall” - Jan Marshall

90. “It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?” - Damon Knight

91. “Dying for someone is easy." J.T. murmured now; as if reading my mind."Living for yourself, that's hard.” - Lisa Gardner

92. “It is only by loving others that we can learn to live; living is rare nowadays...most people survive; that is all.” - Sandra Chami Kassis

93. “As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.” - Nenia Campbell