John Steinbeck Quotes

Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature's deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

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.

The weakest goes to the wall.

I've told you before and I'll tell you again. The strong survive and the weak disappear. We do not intend to disappear.

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

That strong mother doesn't tell her cub, Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you. She says, Toughen up, this is reality we are living in.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

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.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever

Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survive. So our lives go.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

when times are tough, the weak bail and the tough get creative.

In a state of nature, the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and the strong go to the gutter.

In the enclave, the strong and the physically perfect survived, but if you were strong, you protected the weak until they had an opportunity to grow into their own power.

Remember - that which does not kill us can only make us stronger. And that which does kill us leaves us dead!

We are fighters and survivors. We are here. We are alive and breathing, living and loving, birthing and caring, working and earning. The sky is above us. The earth is below us. We can never be poor. ~ NanaAnna

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

If we don't be going strong, we're going weak, and we can't afford to go weak. We've got too many problems to do that.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.

I don’t think we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.