Animals Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Rudyard Kipling

C. S. Lewis

Friedrich Nietzsche

Rumi

Bertrand Russell

Adam Smith

Erich Fromm

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

James Anthony Froude

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

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

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

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

Elizabeth Janeway

The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals, is the means of his support, is the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means.

Thomas Robert Malthus

An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.

Erwin Schrödinger

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

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 do not want to go into its physical reasons: the construction of the human body is different from that of carnivorous animals. But man's intelligence is such that it can be utilised to defend any-thing he does, whether right or wrong.

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

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

Mikhail Bakunin

Animal substance seems to be the first food of all birds, even the granivorous tribes.

William Bartram

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

Brigitte Bardot

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.