Animals Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Rumi

Bertrand Russell

Rudyard Kipling

Adam Smith

Erich Fromm

C. S. Lewis

Friedrich Nietzsche

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

Rudyard Kipling

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

Bertrand Russell

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return.

Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem that he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.

Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?

I would, therefore, say that for no reason whatsoever, except in self-defense, should one think of killing any animal.

The proportion between the velocity with which men or animals move, and the weights they carry, is a matter of considerable importance, particularly in military affairs.

Charles Babbage

But man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

Erwin Schrödinger

To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone.

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

Alfred Russel Wallace

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.

Brigitte Bardot

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied. This woman, walking nonchalantly in a vegetal, bestial manner, through the gardens that have just been stained by a horrible murder, which has frightened the executioner himself and made him flee distracted.... When I want to render these fine nuances, I do not find them in the subject, but in the nature of women in real life who seek unhealthy emotions and are too stupid even to understand the horror in the most appalling situations.

I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

The male — I have found — is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.

The car is not a rabbit or a deer that jumps around in sweeping lines, but it is a man-made work of technology in need of an appropriate roadway. Rather, the car resembles a dragon fly or any other jumping animal that moves shorter distances in straight lines and then changes its direction at different points.

Man is a military animal,
Glories in gunpowder, and loves parade;
Prefers them to all things.

Philip James Bailey

The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There's no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you.