Animal quotes
6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside animal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?"
"Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom."
"I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals."
"Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on."
"God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?"
"Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacements and all vaccinations."
"The moral of the story is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around."
"When I look at birds and animals, their survival is without rules, without conditions, without organization. But mothers take good care of their offspring. That's nature. In human beings also, parents - particularly mothers - and children have a special bond. Mother's milk is a sign of this affection. We are created that way. The child's survival is entirely dependent on someone else's affection. So, basically, each individual's survival or future depends on society. We need these human values."
"Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which."
"The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection."
"If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat."
"Man is a two-legged animal without feathers."
"I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population."
"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations."
"He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, 'till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompts to higher pursuits; and, instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavors to raise himself had produced just the contrary result."
"Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief."
"Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but it is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent; and therefore in strict language it cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent-system. (1794)"
"Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life."
"The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly."
"At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."
