Animals Quotes

“I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

“A dog's spirit dies hard.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“She'd abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.”
― Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three

“Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters.”
― Bernard Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals.

A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.”
― Zeena Schreck, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue

“Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics--such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness--to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It is a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It’s just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement.”
― joy williams, Ill Nature

“One's interest or need does not annul other's right.”
― Al-Hafiz B.A. Masri, Islamic Concern for Animals

“There are mystical, unbreakable bonds between all members of the natural world including humans and animals. Whether or not we remember or acknowledge this relatedness, it still exists.”
― Elizabeth Eiler

“The free animal
has its dying always behind it
and God in front of it, and its way
is the eternal way, as the spring flowing.
Never, not for a moment, do we have
pure space before us, where the flowers
endlessly open.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke Ursula Le Guin

“As much as possible, it is useful to think of all other beings as being just like me. Every living being strives for happiness. Every being wants to avoid all forms of suffering. They are not just objects or things to be used for our benefit. You know, Mahatma Gandhi once said: 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― David Michie, The Dalai Lama's Cat

“One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking what in God’s sweet name did I do.”
― Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, And Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry

“Ce n'était qu'un renard semblable à cent mille autres. Mais j'en ai fait mon ami, et il est maintenant unique au monde.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.”
― Will Cuppy

“Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.”
― Malcolm De Chazal

“When in doubt, follow the senses of beasts.”
― F.T. McKinstry, The Gray Isles

“Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.”
― Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

“What would your shoes say about the things you do everyday?”
― Sherley Mondesir-Prescott, If Your Shoes Could Speak

“Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“You bite the hand that feeds, Speedy said.
Humans don't like that.
They view it as a sign of ingratitude.

I never asked anyone to feed me.

That doesn't seem to matter to them.”
― Patrick Jennings, We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes

“Remember that animals are born to live their own lives, not to serve you! Do not use them; do not exploit them. Let them live their own lives.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“What is with these guys?
Where's the thrill in watching snakes eat?
I certainly didn't thrill in watching humans eat.”
― Patrick Jennings, We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes

“For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Animal?
Ao pensar nesse termo sentiu um leve embaraço.
Era um animal, Luisito? Ou era algo diferente?
O que era afinal um animal?
No desdém do uso comum, as pessoas esqueciam-se muito facilmente da essência dessa palavra. Anima, o termo latina para alma. Sim, o animal era alguém que possuía alma. Por outro lado, não estava muito certa de que se pudesse dizer a mesma coisa da maior parte dos seres humanos."

In "Um companheiro inesquecível", página 34”
― Susana Tamaro

“There I was out in the barn playing midwife to a pregnant mare. I remember sitting there, spinning yarn in the light of a little oil lamp, a city girl who knew nothing about farming, sitting on the deel beside that mother in pain, already beginning the birthing process. All around me there was darkness and perfect silence, except for the mother's pain. It was as if the war didn't exist in those hours.”
― Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say