Animal quotes
6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside animal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Everything in this world has a hidden meaning, I thought. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics; woe to anyone who begins to decipher them and guess what they mean.... When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later, too late, that you understand."
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long."
"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."
"You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us."
"Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat."
"A country is known by the way it treats its animals"
"We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being."
"The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white."
"We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice."
"I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."
"I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior - my dog Rusty. He taught me that animals have personalities, minds, and feelings."
"We are beginning to learn that each animal has a life and a place and a role in this world. If we place compassion and care in the middle of all our dealings with the animal world and honor and respect their lives, our attitudes will change."
"To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot."
"The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies... they are the trees and the plants and the seeds."
"Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God."
"Thanks to our present surgical methods in physiology we can demonstrate at any time almost all phenomena of digestion without the loss of even a single drop of blood, without a single scream from the animal undergoing the experiment."
"The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash."
"Being veterinarians, we're not supposed to be afraid of any animals. And I'm afraid of spiders. They creep me out the way they move. They got hair and saliva. That's wrong. A bug shouldn't have hair on it."
"His ears were often the first thing to catch my tears."
