Devoted

by Dean Koontz

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. —Franz Kafka

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. —Mark Twain

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.

Ultimately, failure can be the father of success if one learns from the errors made.

“But in the end, our origins are all the same, born in the heart that shaped all that is.”

Only now does he realize that the worst of all miseries to afflict the human heart is loneliness.

Keeping a family together and safe was really, really hard.

Love was the best thing when you had it, and the most terrible thing when it was taken from you.

Dogs were incapable of bragging, but they were also incapable of false modesty. Things are what they are, and that’s that.

Adversity was best overcome by positive thinking and hard work.

There were a lot of things in life to worry about, but people were the biggest source of problems,

the world was made exclusively for the innocent.

Stories were as delicious as food. As important as food.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine. You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape

your own life into a story of the best kind.

There are parallel universes, and when we die, we go on living in other realities.

Of all the creatures on Earth, only people and dogs engaged joyfully in play all the days of their lives.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

science, which is the only force on Earth with both the right and the obligation to change everything always and forever.

A marvelous order existed in nature, a damn harsh but rational order, and no deception was involved other than, in some cases, the camouflage of fur or feathers, or chameleon scales. In the wilds, no lies were told by tongue or pen. He hoped that the better he understood the

way of nature, the better he’d understand the way a man needed to live to have respect for himself and others that included no self-delusions or equally egregious errors.

envy and coveting were poisons from which arose the lust for power and all evil.

love was essential to maintain innocence.

Humility was the foundation for all lasting achievements.

The bond between humanity and dogs had flourished for maybe a hundred thousand years.

The why of things, however, was more often shrouded in eternal mystery.

Progress was real progress only when it evolved naturally and thoughtfully

from the history of human experience and accumulated wisdom. When it was imposed in contempt for that experience and wisdom, then progress was in fact radical destruction.

history showed utopian thinking to lead inevitably to disaster and often to mass murder on an industrial scale.

If one believed something with all one’s heart, that made it enough of a truth on which to base a life, at least one day at a time.

people needed—desperately needed—to receive unto themselves the innocence of dogs, to acquire their intolerance for deceit, and to seek to match their loyalty.

if you understood the cold indifference of nature, as dogs did, then you did not hope to live forever in this violent world. You tried instead to make the world better while you were here, and you put your hope in another, better world.