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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

William Bartram

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

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.

William Hazlitt

I know at last what distinguishes man from animals; financial worries.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

George Berkeley

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

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

"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

Edward Thorndike

In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.

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

Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put those animals out in herds on the beaches so they will live their own lives.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

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.