Animals Quotes

1. "With most animals, as with man, the alertness of the senses diminishes after years of work, after domestic habits and progress of culture."
Author: Alexander Von Humboldt

2. "Humanism is the affirmation of man as a free and responsible being. Nothing degrades man more than the proclamation of irresponsibility. Man is responsible, animals and things are not."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

3. "Fern's never had very good luck with animals. She smothers them with affection and care and they thank her by croaking. Fern hasn't figured out how to play hard to get."
Author: Amy Harmon

4. "Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish—something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts—or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log."
Author: Bill Bryson

5. "Every animal is a tradition, and together they are a vast part of our heritage as human beings. No animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. By ourselves, we people are simply balls of protoplasm. We merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied, and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been: gods, slaves, totems, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more."
Author: Boria Sax

6. "Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral."
Author: Charles Darwin

7. "I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it's not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage!"
Author: Cheryl Strayed

8. "I asked "What do you even do with a chimera?""What wouldn't you do with a chimera?" Jeff asked. "They're like the Swiss Army knife of animals."
Author: Chloe Neill

9. "How much of my fever-induced dream was real? I felt safe assuming that my time as a bee was fiction, as well as a few mythological animals that I swear I'd seen. Then I'd lived on the sun with aliens."
Author: Cora Carmack

10. "We humans are such complicated and confused beings that we call the animals beasts."
Author: Cristiane Serruya

11. "You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
Author: Dan Barker

12. "As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to."
Author: Dan Simmons

13. "There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive."
Author: David Attenborough

14. "The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants."
Author: David Attenborough

15. "Mrs. Horowitz said, "It is inexcusable that humans think they can murder other animals because they murder themselves. I must tell you, I hate humans. They terrify me.""They should," I continued. "I interviewed Yehudi Menuhin the other day."
Author: David Dubal

16. "Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals 'love' them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more."
Author: Edwin Way Teale

17. "Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?"
Author: Elias Canetti

18. "Donald Watson, who founded The Vegan Society in 1944 and who lived a healthy, active life until passing on in 2005, maintained that dairy products, such as milk, eggs, and cheese, were every bit as cruel and exploitive of sentient animal life as was slaughtering animals for their flesh: "The unquestionable cruelty associated with the production of dairy produce has made it clear that lactovegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh-eating and a truly humane, civilised diet, and we think, therefore, that during our life on earth we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the ‘full journey.'" He also avoided wearing leather, wool or silk and used a fork, rather than a spade in his gardening to avoid killing worms.Let us instil in others the reverence or life that Donald Watson had and that he passed on to us."
Author: Gary L. Francione

19. "Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum."
Author: Gregory Benford

20. "Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different."
Author: Heather O'Neill

21. "Like animals we call to each other," was the thought that came to him as he remembered the hour of love in the afternoon."
Author: Hermann Hesse

22. "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."
Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer

23. "If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart."
Author: J. M. Coetzee

24. "The other mammoths were as protective of the dying as they were of newborns, and they gathered around tying to make the fallen one get up. When all was over, they buried the dead ancestor under piles of dirt, grass, leaves, or snow. Mammoths were even known to bury other dead animals, including humans."
Author: Jean M. Auel

25. "Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants."
Author: John Cage

26. "We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living."
Author: John Updike

27. "Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we ear animals?"
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

28. "But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

29. "Far too often animals are put to sleep when they could be saved through proper care and nursing."
Author: Louis Leakey

30. "Pigs prefer to wallow in clean mud, but if nothing else is available, they will frequently wallow in their own urine, giving rise to the notion that they are dirty animals."
Author: Marvin Harris

31. "But it was Aldo's pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to "scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm." Most of the Pine Cone's articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo's own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the "flavor of the wilds."
Author: Marybeth Lorbiecki

32. "If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat."
Author: Matthew Scully

33. "To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92).--For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts"
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston

34. "I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were."
Author: May Sarton

35. "All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment."
Author: Oscar Wilde

36. "Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, madam: that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals."
Author: Pierre Beaumarchais

37. "I know it's technically goodwill to all men, but in my mind, I drop the men because that feels segregationist/elitist/sexist/generally bad ist.Goodwill shouldn't be just for men. It should also apply to women and children, and all animals, even the yucky ones like subway rats. I'd evenextend the goodwill not just to living creatures but to the dearly departed, and if we include them, we might as well include the undead, thosesupposedly mythic beings like vampires, and if they're in, then so are elves, fairies, and gnomes. Heck, since we're already being so generous in ourbig group hug, why not also embrace those supposedly inanimate objects like dolls and stu"
Author: Rachel Cohn

38. "Katrina held Bram in her arms, speaking softly, reassuringly, as they approached baby Modoc.This was an important moment, a beginning, for she knew the boy would spend his life with animals, especially elephants, and the meeting was of utmost importance. Neither the elephant nor the baby said a word. All was quiet as they looked at each other. Mo's small trunk wormed its way up, reaching to the baby. As Bram leaned over, his little hand pulled loose from Katrina's grasp found its way down toward the trunk. A finger extended to meet the tip of the trunk. Bram's expression was one of curiosity; he felt the wet tip, Modoc moved her "finger" all around Bram's hand, sliding it across each finger and the palm. A big tickle grin spread across Bram's face, Modoc did her elephant "chirp," a tear glistened as it ran down Katrina's face. All was well. The future had been written."
Author: Ralph Helfer

39. "This is the Wilderness School. 'Where the Kids are animals"
Author: Rick Riordan

40. "I slowly began making a few photos with animals over the years, and I liked how people reacted to them. When I would have the animals on set, I'd notice the way the models would interact with them and there was so much true emotion that you rarely see between two human beings."
Author: Ryan McGinley

41. "If a man lets all of my dogs sleep in the bed with us, then that is the most romantic thing. You must love my dogs in order to love me. A man who is nice to my animals and doesn't shoo them away - well, that's the height of romance."
Author: Salma Hayek

42. "Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country."
Author: Sam Simon

43. "Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours -- to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you."
Author: Savitri Devi

44. "Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead."
Author: Steve Rasnic Tem

45. "There is still a chance to change things. We can provide fresh drinking water to all people. We can make sure crops are not regulated for profit; we can ensure that they are not genetically altered to benefit manufacturers. Our people are dying because we are feeding them poison. Animals are dying because we are forcing them to eat waste, forcing them to live in their own filth, caging them together and abusing them. Plants are withering away because we are dumping chemicals into the earth that make them hazardous to our health. But these are things we can fix."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

46. "Not liking Christine would be like not liking small fluffy animals. And Christine was just like a small fluffy animal. A rabbit, perhaps. It was certainly impossible for her to get a whole idea into her head in one go. She had to nibble it into manageable bits."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die…. "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive….." The guest star retires down the corridors."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

48. "A lot of hip-hop artists wear fur, and they think it's a status symbol. That doesn't register for me; I just see dead animals."
Author: Tommy Lee

49. "Never, even among animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is only seen among men."
Author: Victor Hugo

50. "Certainly," quoth Athelstane, "women are the least to be trusted of all animals, monks and abbots excepted."
Author: Walter Scott

Animals Quotes Pictures