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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"Luis is right there.” I point to the corner of the yard, where my little brother is the centre of attention doing imitations of barnyard animals. I have yet to inform him that talent isn’t as much of a chick magnet when you get into junior high."
"A spiritual man should be a normal man, a sound man. God Himself is normal; He is not insane. In order to reach God, a spiritual person has to be divinely practical in his day-to-day activities. Spirituality does not negate the outer life. But we have to know that the outer life does not mean the animal life. The outer life should be the manifestation of the divine life within us."
"When I was an animal I evolved through selfishness. Now that I am a man my evolution can be achieved only through self-sacrifice."
"The world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a selfperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained."
"I think it's very wrong to have the mass murder, every single day, of millions of animals."
"I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the Creator and Father of us all, is the source of them, and also the source of our conscience. I believe that to the degree people live by this inspired conscience, they will grow to fulfill their natures; to the degree that they do not, they will not rise above the animal plane."
"If we are willing to be still and open enough to listen, wilderness itself will teach us."
"Our relationship with nature is more one of being than having. We are nature: we do not have nature."
"Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis."
"[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists."
"We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of these genes ( enzymes and proteins ) as they influence the course of embryology . In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies."
"Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either."
"It is time my colleagues got real. All British universities doing worthwhile research use animals, and, instead of hiding, they should be boasting of their achievements."
"My own field, the prevention of genetic disorders in babies, has been possible only because of humane work on animals."
"You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human."
"There needs to be clearer communication for the public avout how valuable it [animal testing] is"
"As a human being on Earth, you can't imagine friendship not being important in some other solar system or some other planet, or some other context of beings that are conscious. We even see it in animals. It is important for people on Earth to reach out or reach into someone."
"People are still disturbingly vague about the treatment of animals. People still seem to believe that meat is a particular substance not at all connected to animals playing in the field over there. People don't realise how gruesomely and fighteningly the animal gets to the plate."
"It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all."
"all tamed animals are nervous, we have given them reason to be, not only by cruelty but by our love too, that presses upon them. They have not been able to be entirely indifferent to this and untouched by it."
