John Burnside Quotes

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

I don't ever expect to be permanently happy. I don't think that's part of the human condition.

In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

The first inclination which an animal has is to protect itself

Frightened is the natural state for all men.

Surviving is not something you need to learn. You don't need to learn survival skills; you have them already. That's why we're here, all of us, because it's a game of survival anyway.

No, no! I do nature injustice. She gave us inventive faculty, and set us naked, and helpless on the shore of this great ocean,--the world; swim those who can, the heavy may go to the bottom.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

We are all wired into a survival trip, now.

I think it's miraculous that anybody survives themselves.

Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.

We are all mortals, and each is for himself.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

One of the nice things about looking at a bear is that you know it spends 100 per cent of every minute of every day being a bear. It doesn't strive to become a better bear. It doesn't go to sleep thinking, "I wasn't really a very good bear today". They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment

Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.