Quotes about Survival

Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.

Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright.

They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

There is nothing in this world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one's life.

If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.

After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. (...). Pointing through the window of the hut, she said 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' (...). Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.