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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"The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them."
"Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism."
"I think in rural settings, people have a different appreciation for animals than might the city dweller. In parts of India where poisonous snake bite is common, people have a much different value system. I live in a city. I'm not thinking about wolves, lions, etc."
"I think there is something very interesting about people who live day to day in an environment where they could get taken out by a wild animal. There has to be some kind respect that is derived from that relationship."
"An appreciation of animals is good for a human, it can lead to a better understanding and respect for all living things."
"I've never been in a situation where I had to run for my life, but I've been bitten by a lot of poisonous snakes where it was fairly painful. Pythons of size have a lot of teeth in that mouth, it's a painful bite and those wounds get infected fairly easily. I've got snake wounds from these animals that have lasted quite a while where it'll ache for several days. Having said that, I've been lucky; it's not like I'm looking for trouble with these animals either. It's not an envelope I'm willing to push."
"I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals."
"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting"
"A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity."
"Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?"
"Man, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby has he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph has he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain."
"Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?"
"Animals know nothing of themselves, and they also know nothing of the world."
"The saying, "The Magyar is much too lazy to be bored," is worth thinking about. Only the most subtle and active animals are capable of boredom.--A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation."
"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all."
"The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory."
"Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself."
"Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal."
"There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'"
"Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal."
