"Every failure, every adversity, every heartache may be a blessing in disguise providing it softens the animal portion of our nature."
Animal quotes
Animal
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Animal quotes (page 64 of 316)
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"He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything."
"In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear."
"I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us."
"Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me."
"The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings."
"Although Verwoerd thought Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure. Political assassination is not something I or the ANC ever supported. It is a primitive way of contending with an opponent"
"In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth."
"A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid."
"A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line"
"The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence."
"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
"I think we learn some of the greatest lessons in life from animals, whether it's love, suffering, or the value of silence."
"I think it's time we take a step back and recognize that while we are hurting our animals, we are hurting each other, and we are hurting our planet."
"The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."
"Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts."
"Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription."
"I'm totally against animal cruelty. I don't have clothes, shoes or bags made from any animal products."
"What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction."
"Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others."