Animal quotes

Animal

6.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

6.3K quotes

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Browse quotes that often appear alongside animal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

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Animal quotes (page 70 of 316)

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Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
Animal

"We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human."

Self Mistake Animal
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Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
Animal

"For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year."

Years Animal Average
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Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
Animal

"It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?"

Children Littles Animal
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Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
Animal

"The gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them."

Animal Benefits Borders
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Catherine Wilson Philosopher
Animal

"Some critics thought the ontology and theory of qualities absurd. No one had ever seen these little atoms, and furthermore, how could their mere arrangement produce a noisy, colourful, world in which day followed night and animals generated their own kind? Instead of a world created, cared, for and supervised by supernatural persons, the Epicureans appeared to the theologians to be assigning everything to chance. The latter were appalled by Lucretius's view of religion as cruel and oppressive and by the Epicurean insistence that death is the end of all experience."

Night Animal Views
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Catherine Wilson Philosopher
Animal

"Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren't permitted to harm (animals, 'infidels'); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps)."

Children Animal Sacrifice
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Catherine Wilson Philosopher
Animal

"Aristotle saw nature as intelligent and purposive, whereas for the Epicureans, and the 17th century 'mechanical' philosophers, there is no intentionality in nature except where there are animal minds and bodies."

Mind Animal Intelligent
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Charles Darwin Naturalist, Geologist
Animal

"Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush."

Believe Animal Passion
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Charles Dickens Novelist
Animal

"You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir!"

Mind Animal Facts
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Charles Dickens Novelist
Animal

"Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day."

Animal Dog Cat
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Charles Dickens Novelist
Animal

"Why should I disguise what you know so well, but what the crowd never dream of? We companies are all birds of prey; mere birds of prey. The only question is, whether in serving our own turn, we can serve yours too; whether in double-lining our own nest, we can put a single living into yours."

Dream Animal Bird
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Cheryl Strayed Author, Memoirist
Animal

"My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home."

Home Mother Animal
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Cheryl Strayed Author, Memoirist
Animal

"When someone you love truly dies, you have to find them over and over again in the world, and I think you do that on a very psychic, unconscious level, and I think in some ways I was calling out to that spirit of my mother when I saw the fox. It doesn't surprise me it's in animals that I find my mother."

Thinking Mother Animal
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Claude Bernard Physiologist
Animal

"The physiologist is not a man of the world, he is a scientist, a man caught and absorbed by a scientific idea that he pursues; he no longer hears the cries of the animals, no longer sees the flowing blood, he sees only his idea: organisms that hide from him problems that he wants to discover. He doesn't feel that he is in a horrible carnage; under the influence of a scientific idea, he pursues with delight a nervous filament inside stinking and livid flesh that for any other person would be an object of disgust and horror."

Men Animal Blood
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Clive Thompson Journalist
Animal

"That's the old ecological tale that explains humans' inability to fully appreciate global warming. To wit: if you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it jumps out. If you drop it in a pan of cold water, then turn the heat up slowly, you can roast it to death."

Funny Animal Appreciate
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Colin Wilson Author, Philosopher
Animal

"Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals."

Men Reality Animal
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