Have you reviewed the manual?  Im not sure if it gives any strategies in there

https://www.luckymobile.ca/Web/pdfs/ZTE-Cymbal-2-UserGuide-EN.pdf

Also you may be able to plug in the USB cable from the phone to a computer and you may be able to find a folder for text messages.  It will take some exploring and I’m not sure if the file that holds the text will be in a easily readable format.  

As a last resort you can take a video/photos of the text messages with another phone.

I looked through the phone and couldn’t find a folder for texts. Plugged into pc, same thing. No folder. I emailed ZTE with no success, waiting on a reply from Koodo and MOBILEdit. Tried Reddit, waiting for a reply. At this point it seems my only option is to go through the hundreds of texts and manually copy them. I’m one for really tedious work, but this flip phone is finicky some times and will jump to the most recent text. I got a flip phone because “nostalgia” and boy am I kicking myself now. 

I forgot to address your original question about checking their guide. I checked it before but will check again. Maybe I overlooked something. 

Went through the guide using the Find operation. “Extract” offered nothing. “Text” just told me about texting.. etc. 

Support for flip phones these days are very limited.

In the past there were computer apps (official and developed by users) that could extra this kind of phone info. But those are not likely not available since flip phones are just not popular enough. I couldn't even name the most popular flip phone (dumb phone) today

I assume this is you？

It is. I ended up manually copying them myself. Took  a good 3.5 hours. This thread can be closed/locked now. I appreciate you replying, Dennis. Thank you for your help