You cannot survive for long if you are not frightened.
When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.
The rule of survival, he thought. Keep eye peeled regarding situation around you. Learn its demands. And — meet them. Be there at the right time doing the right thing.
The enemy is any-body who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.
Sometimes surviving means compromise.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds – a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.[Notre civilisation se survit dans la complaisance d’âmes lâches ou haineuses, le vœu de gloriole de vieux adolescents.]
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.
