"Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."
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Animal quotes
Animal
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Animal quotes (page 35 of 316)
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"Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone."
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"Even a hare, the weakest of animals, may insult a dead lion."
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"When you're wearing an animal costume and something bad happens, your facial expression doesn't change. The animal is deadpan the whole time. If you're skiing in a gorilla suit and you fall, you just see a gorilla who has no emotion. It's just a stoic gorilla, wildly falling down a hill, out of control."
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"When I look up at the clouds I see so many animals, mostly sheep who have lost their limbs and heads."
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"Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along."
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"So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted."
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"The lower animals, on the other hand, must have their bodily structure modified in order to survive under greatly changed conditions. They must be rendered stronger, or acquire more effective teeth or claws, in order to defend themselves from new enemies; or they must be reduced in size so as to escape detection and danger. When they migrate into a colder climate they must become clothed with thicker fur, or have their constitutions altered. If they fail to be thus modified, they will cease to exist."
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"Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed."
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"The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them."
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"I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy - or partly free market economy - as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well."
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"I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise."
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"At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a "problem" of it."
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"The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal."
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"Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest."
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"We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also."
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"Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years."
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"In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth."
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"Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you."
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"I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."
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