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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"I see several animals that live so entire and perfect a life, some without sight, others without hearing: who knows whether to us also one, two, or three, or many other senses, may not be wanting?"
"The Human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. Every time we remember, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again and again and again."
"All praise is to Allah, I'll fight any man, any animal, if Jesus were here I'd fight him too."
"Not fooling around, not bothering nobody, just sitting here mending the Primus," said the cat with a hostile frown, "and, moreover, I consider it my duty to warn you that the cat is an ancient, inviolable animal."
"The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice"
"I remember I picked up a person from the street who was nearly eaten up with maggots, and he said, I have lived like an animal, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for."
"How many times we have picked up in the streets human beings who had been living like animals and were longing to die like angels!"
"Vampires have bright eyes glistening white teeth unnaturally smooth skin and a certain animal magnetism. If they aren't pretty they starve. It's sort of like life in Los Angeles."
"After a conversation with someone that went on all night, but I didn't take much persuading, and the next day I was a vegetarian. It came down to one question, can you be healthy without killing animals? If the answer is 'yes' then the only reason you're killing is because you like the taste. But you can't take a life just because you like its taste."
"The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations."
"When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she."
"I love animals and I love to see movies with animals that are done respectfully, you know?"
"This is a really good circus. It has lions, tigers, dogs, monkeys and about any other animal act you can think of. There are a lot of great acts, and it's a two part, two hour show."
"As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter."
"For all we know that English people are/ Fed upon beef - I won't say much of beer/ Because 'tis liquor only, and being far/ From this my subject, has no business here;/ We know too, they are very fond of war,/ A pleasure - like all pleasures - rather dear;/ So were the Cretans - from which I infer/ That beef and battle both were owing her"
"People are only animals, but special animals. Every animal has fought and killed to survive, even before the dinosaurs. We're the only ones that do it for fun. That's why I don't know about Darwinism. Supposedly evolution and natural selection are all about survival, but we haven't gotten smarter over the years, only more dangerous."
"The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too."
"Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much."
"It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!"
"It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!"
