c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We all came into this world wired to connect with all life.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory. After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane—that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule.
— Herbert M. Shelton, Food and Feeding
Zookeeper foible #1: Tendency to not equate fur and scale with fracture and scar.
— Wendy Beck, 9th Life
Better to honor the pinch of fear than regret the punch of fang.
— Wendy Beck, 9th Life
I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter.
— Richard Adams
HOW DO YOU FIND THE RIGHT POSITIONTO LIE DOWN WITH PEOPLEOR EVEN ANIMALS?OFTEN ONE OF THE PARTNERS ISSMOTHERED OR CONTORTED.WHEN DONE PROPERLY, THOUGH,EVERYONE IS HAPPY.
— Jenny Holzer
Many people who live with animals have noticed that their cat or dog becomes solicitous of them when they are feeling unwell. A cat who is normally aloof may come sit in the sick person's lap; a normally rambunctious dog may tone himself down when his human friend isn't up to romping or running. In some cases, the ability of animals to sense illness in a human has been lifesaving.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
I love cheetahs. Every moment of every day is spent in fear of dying a terrible death yet they always carry themselves elegantly, remain loyal to their family, and never complain about anything.
— Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann
Slow animals always become prey in the end.
— John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter
Animals fight wars
—  flowers practice peace.
A group of owls is called a parliament, wisdom, or study.
— Kimberley Payne, Adam's Animals - fun facts about God's Creation
Has it ever struck you as odd that humans are the only creatures on the planet who wear clothes? Everything else, from aardvarks to zebras, is running around in its birthday suit, blissfully unclear of the concept of underpants. Why don't people do the same?
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
I take it hard when an animal in my care suffers or dies. I take it even harder when the animal's suffering is the result of human exploitation or carelessness.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
Great teachers often come to us in humble packaging. That little dog held the wisdom of a sage in his heart. I learned from him that healing is not about the success or failure of the physical body, that physical survival is secondary. All creatures wish to live and thrive, but bodies do wear out. The number of days we walk the earth (or fly or swim or crawl on it) is not the point. Animals live in the present moment. If kindness, caring, and respect fill that moment, life is fill, no matter what came before or what might come in the future. A soul that feels loved is joyous and healed.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
For the animals in nature, everywhere is their houses! When we touch anywhere in nature, we must know that we knock their doors!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It is commonplace, and true, to point out that animals are happier than people because they live entirely in the present.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
Animals suffer both emotionally and physically, but they don't suffer metaphysically. That is, they don't suffer about suffering, don't get thrown into spiritual confusion by it, or fall out of connection with the divine because of it.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
Because we tend to equate intelligence with language--particularly the ability to use language to think and communicate abstractions--it is natural to conclude that animals are, on the whole, a lot less intelligent than we are.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
Animals don't know exactly what will happen when they die any more than we do. In the absence of specific knowledge, they simply trust. They trust death the way they trust life: as participation in the Source. What will happen when they die must be okay because what is happening now is okay.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!
— Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
Be prepared. A dog is adorable and noble.A dog is a true and loving friend. A dogis also a hedonist.
— Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.
— Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
How can we expect wild animals to survive if we give them nowhere in the wild to live?
— Anthony Douglas Williams, Inside the Divine Pattern
My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins.I know this is troubling.I too find it hard to believe there is a connection across time and space, linking me to a race of ill-mannered clowns.Chimps. There's no excuse for them.
— Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan
'I can get mad all I want, but they don't mean it. They love me. Sometimes, some creatures, when they get cornered, they forget who loves them and think everybody's the enemy. You don't just leave them alone, cold and afraid, because their instinct takes over and it's wrong. You don't if you give a shit, you know?' 
— Amy Lane, Making Promises
No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?
— J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe; and grains of enormously increased productiveness, whose fat kernels are filled with more and better nourishment, a veritable storehouse of perfect food—new food for all the world's untold millions for all time to come.
— Luther Burbank
The belief that every living thing has an individual soul is called animism. (Anima, which means 'soul,' is also the root of the word 'animal.') Anthropologists have found this belief to be universal in children, though the children themselves don't think of it as a belief. It is, to them, one of the most obvious features of the world around them, and the most obvious way of interpreting what goes on in that world.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way.
— Alan Hodgkin
And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, that's all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read children's books with animals in them set in England would know that. Is The Wind in the Willows written in Mole with a little Ratty thrown in? Is Winnie-the-Pooh written in Bear? No, it's English, because that's what the animals there speak. I didn't know that before. Travel is so broadening.
— Polly Horvath, Lord and Lady Bunny--Almost Royalty!
When an animal comes between the lion and its prey, the animal first becomes the prey before the main prey.
— Uzoma Nnadi
How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.
— Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs
It’s almost funny, isn’t it?”“What is?”“How some animals are worth more than others?”“Well,” he handed Konrad a sugar cube from a tin on the shelf. “It isn’t just the animal; it’s the type of animal.”“Color, shape, size? If people pay for an animal based on what it looks like, what does that say about them?”“It isn’t necessarily what they look like.” He frowned. “It’s about where they come from.”“That’s silly,” she said.
— Amanda Lance, Endangered Hearts
An infinity of these tiny animals defoliate our plants, our trees, our fruits... they attack our houses, our fabrics, our furniture, our clothing, our furs ... He who in studying all the different species of insects that are injurious to us, would seek means of preventing them from harming us, would seek to cause them to perish, proposes for his goal important tasks indeed.
— René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur
Dogs are the best example of a being who doesn't need to lie to protect someone's pride.
— Ammiel Josiah Monterde.
In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
I believe the happiness we feel in relation to animals is immensely significant. I believe it is absolutely central to our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
I believe we have this idea that bad things ought to be prevented from happening.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
I hate metaphors. That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.
— Ron Swanson
EVERY DOG’S STORYI have a bed, my very own.It’s just my size.And sometimes I like to sleep alonewith dreams inside my eyes.But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepyand I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why.But I’m no longer sleepyand too slowly the hours go by.So I climb on the bed where the light of the moonis shining on your faceand I know it will be morning soon.Everybody needs a safe place.
— Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
Elk have not been seen in Switzerland for many a year. In the interests of scientific accuracy, please strike the idea of elk from your mind. If you must, think of ibexes instead, a fierce and agile type of goat with great spiraling horns. Marmots will also do in a pinch, but under no circumstances should you think of elk. No. Elk. The elkless among you may now proceed.
— Maryrose Wood, The Unseen Guest
There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.
— Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines
Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it...
— Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable.
— Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.
— P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
The creatures I have sent to their God are not men. They abdicated the right to the name by committing acts of inhuman savagery so that they cannot even count themselves among God's beasts. For even the beasts have better reason for what they do- and so have I. If those be men, I rank myself gladly with the animals. There are places in this world where the force of law holds sway; it is a great pity that Larissa is not one of them.
— Rebecca Ashe
Her learning to sew (from a book Yankel brought back from Lvov) coincided with her refusal to wear any clothes that she did not make for herself, and when he bought her a book about animal physiology, she held the pictures to his face and said, "Don’t you think it’s strange, Yankel, how we eat them?""I’ve never eaten a picture.""The animals. Don’t you find that strange? I can’t believe I never found it strange before. It’s like your name, how you don’t notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can’t help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your whole life.""Yankel. Yankel. Yankel. Nothing so strange for me.""I won’t eat them, at least not until it doesn’t seem strange to me.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
If you are in doubt about what's balanced, look to the natural world. Animals know the right paths.
— F.T. McKinstry, Ascarion
I once believed man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not.
— Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
In moments of peace such as I experienced that day with Edal there exists some unritual reunion with the rest of creation without which the lives of many are trivial. 'Extinct' applies as much to an essential mental attitude as to the vanished creatures of the earth such as the Dodo. We can no longer await some scientific revelation to avoid the destruction of our species in this context; the evidence is all there, the writing on the wall. The way back cannot be the same for all of us, but for those like myself it means a descent of the rungs until we stand again amid the other creatures of the earth and share to some small extent their vision of it, even though this may be labelled Wordsworthian romanticism.
— Gavin Maxwell, Raven, Seek Thy Brother
New Rule: Stop leaving couches on the sidewalk. Besides being lazy and ugly, it's animal cruelty. You teach your dog not to pee on the couch, and then when you take him to the place he's supposed to pee, there's a couch.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Nature, ... in order to carry out the marvelous operations [that occur] in animals and plants has been pleased to construct their organized bodies with a very large number of machines, which are of necessity made up of extremely minute parts so shaped and situated as to form a marvelous organ, the structure and composition of which are usually invisible to the naked eye without the aid of a microscope. ... Just as Nature deserves praise and admiration for making machines so small, so too the physician who observes them to the best of his ability is worthy of praise, not blame, for he must also correct and repair these machines as well as he can every time they get out of order.
— Marcello Malpighi
Humans are the worst kind of animals because of the circles they belong to.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and evento raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At thesame time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendouscrimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than arelatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to finda more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmiclevels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives.
— Boria Sax
For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.
— Marcello Malpighi
I asked "What do you even do with a chimera?""What wouldn't you do with a chimera?" Jeff asked. "They're like the Swiss Army knife of animals.
— Chloe Neill, Biting Bad
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
Walk in kindness toward the Earth and every living being. Without kindness and compassion for all of Mother Nature’s creatures, there can be no true joy; no internal peace, no happiness. Happiness flows from caring for all sentient beings as if they were your own family, because in essence they are. We are all connected to each other and to the Earth.
— Sylvia Dolson, Joy of Bears
The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways--when you began writing me dizzy letters about Alexander, I didn't ask if you were in love with him, I asked what his favorite animal was. And your answer told me everything I needed to know about him--how many men would admit that they loved ducks?
— Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Like us, animals feel love, joy, fear and pain, but they cannot grasp the spoken word. It is our obligation to speak on their behalf ensuring their well-being and lives are respected and protected.
— Sylvia Dolson, Joy of Bears
Many people know that animals around the world are treated badly, yet they turn their minds away. To be vegan means to care deeply about how our choices help or harm animals, how we create peace or suffering in the world. Our choices are powerful. Vegan is love.
— Ruby Roth, Vegan Is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action
If I was going to spend the next day in jail for obstruction of justice, I'd better get a good nights sleep.
— Kathi Daley, Halloween Hijinks
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
wup-wup-wup" - Pil and Popo
— H.R. Willaston, Nine Days
There's something comforting about the companionship of animals in a new place.
— Patrick Carman, Stargazer
Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando twobirds short of a dinner party....I know I’m pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.
— Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper
Oh yes," said Jana. "You want the birdbath." She let him down onto the rim of the birdbath, then watched as he dipped his head, lowered his chest into the water, and raised it. Having finished his bath, he did a dance of sheer joy, flapping his wings and shaking off the water in a circle of drops. "He enjoys life," said a voice. Mr. Powell the optometrist, a closed umbrella in hand, was letting his two dachshunds chase each other around the park. "As do your dogs," said Jana. "Yes," said Mr. Powell,"they have fun in a simpler and more joyous way than most humans do. Their pleasures seem more reliable. All you have to do is say the word 'walk' and they're wiggling from head to toe....
— Betsy Woodman, Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes
When in doubt, follow the senses of beasts.
— F.T. McKinstry, The Gray Isles
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
How much does an elephant weigh? 
— Rhonda Patton, African Safari with Ted and Raymond
You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.
— Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead
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
I'm a dog lover and sex addict. Those two things are unrelated. 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
Animals shouldn’t be hunted and nature shouldn’t be disturbed, even destroyed, to benefit the whims of mankind
— Charles Manson
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: My Life with Autism
Yes, but humans are more important than animals,' said Brutha.'This is a point of view often expressed by humans,' said Om.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
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 N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
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
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
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
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
The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do we havepure space before us, where the flowersendlessly open.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, our shaky anthropocentric, rationalist egos have been brainwashed to forget what 'primitive' cultures once understood: Animals can be manifestations of celestial beings in disguise; they possess supernatural abilities, and they can be our spiritual guides and healers.
— Zeena Schreck, Beatdom #11: The Nature Issue
But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!
— H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
Heaven is high and earth wide.If you ride three feet above ground than other men,you will know what that means.
— Rudolf C. Binding
Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.
— Christopher Gérard
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
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
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
Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs.
— Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland
This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing
— Michael Pollan
We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.
— Justin Torres, We the Animals
Few celebrate a dog who jumps at people as they approach--but start with the premise that it is we who keep ourselves (and our faces) unbearably far away, and we can come to a mutual understanding.
— Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile.
— Christopher  Gerard, Talon: A Jack Rawson Saga
My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.
— Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan
I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.
— Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
Valuable and ingenious he might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,’ he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.’‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.
— Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise
Daisy didn't just change our lives, she changed our destiny.
— Maryam Faresh, Daisy
Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.
— Douglas Tallamy
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
— Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist
I don’t have to be logical. I’m a leopard. We’re considered wild animals, you know. (Spoken by Megan.)
— Amy Neftzger, The Orphanage of Miracles
I looked at all the caged animals. . . . . . . the cast-offs of human society. I saw in their eyes love and hope, fear and dread, sadness and betrayal. And I was angry."God," I said, "this is terrible! Why don't you do something?"God was silent for a moment and then He spoke softly."I have done something. . .I created you.
— Jim Willis
Research suggests that the earliest flying reptiles swallowed small pieces of volcanic rock and could breathe out flammable gases like hydrogen produced in their own bodies. It is hypothesized that their ingenious “fire breath” was used as a defense against predatory reptiles.
— Karen Shanor, Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
The cost to reconnect animals to live in natural settings without human support is a debt that many animals in transition must honor with their lives.
— Young Tim
Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.
— Peter Allison, How to Walk a Puma: And Other Things I Learned While Stumbling through South America
Also surprising to scientists have been the recently documented virgin births in captivity of several types of sharks—the hammerhead, the bonnethead (also known as the shovelhead), and the blacktip.
— Karen Shanor, Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
the mangrove killfish, lives in South American and southern US coastal swamps that can either dry up or become so toxic that the fish has to find refuge in the mud or by flipping and jumping across land. Amazingly, its skin and gills change so the killfish can breathe air and survive out of the water for as long as ten weeks.
— Karen Shanor, Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
But after dealing with Roy for a while I just wanted to get through the time I’d signed on for, to prove to myself that I couldn’t be beaten by a girly-faced, chicken-boned, racist cat.
— Peter Allison, How to Walk a Puma: And Other Things I Learned While Stumbling through South America
One question that especially intrigues me is exactly when humpbacks started coming to Hawaii and why. In artwork and oral histories of ancient Hawaiians there is no record of humpback whales being there, and there is no evidence that humpbacks were there in large numbers in the mid-1800's during the heyday of whaling. The whalers who provisioned in Hawaii in the winter couldn't have overlooked the numbers of whales that are in Hawaii now. We really don't know what happened, but everything points to a recent colonization of humpbacks. (p.162).
— Charles "Flip" Nicklin, Among Giants: A Life with Whales
The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into a graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the shallows with diffident elegance in the falling light, not feeding but only staring off toward the ocean. They seemed a kind of animal I had never quite seen before.
— Barry López, About This Life
It struck me that the beauty we attribute to children isn’t something they have that we don’t. It's something they do, which we have long since stopped doing—just describing things as we see them, the simple, unadorned facts.
— Christina Carson, Suffer the Little Children
The only good cage is an empty cage.
— Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer
But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.
— Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer
It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.
— John  Williams, Butcher's Crossing
I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I 'came out,' I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her 'him.' To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self.My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn't need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn't live with myself, wouldn't be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings--beings who had their own desires--merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh.Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other's bodies is nobody else's business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body without their consent.
— pattrice jones
Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.
— Terri Windling, The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People
We make our journey in the company of others; the deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are.
— Daniel Quinn
I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.
— Belinda Jeffrey, One Long Thread
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
One trained dog equals 60 search-and-rescue workers.
— Charles Stoehr
animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature's fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world's most emotionally human land mammal.
— Daphne Sheldrick
Don't judge a cat by its coat.
— Magdalena VandenBerg
All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
— Daniel Quinn
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal.
— Catherine Mackinnon
Crossover' is a word scientists use to describe dolphins' soaring over seas, their traveling so free and fast, so high-spirited and almost effervescent that their sleek bodies barely skim the waves. The suggestion of splashes from tail and pectoral leaves a luminous wake across the water. For these crossover miles, the dolphins, like their human terrestrial mammal kin, belong more to the element of air than the sea....Held in [the dolphins'] fluid embrace, I pulled my arms close against my sides and our communal speed increased... Racing around the lagoon, I opened my eyes again to see nothing but an emerald underwater blur. And then I remembered what I had either forgotten long ago or never quite fully realized. This feeling of being carried along by other animals was fam
— Brenda Peterson, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals
Sometimes she could swear that she saw, in Joe Grey's eyes, a judgment far too perceptive, a watchfulness too aware and intense for any cat.Charlie didn't understand what it was about those two [cats]. Both had a presence that set them apart from other felines.Maybe she just knew them better. Maybe all cats had that quality of awareness, when you knew them.
— Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Cat in the Dark
Neither compares nor competes.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It is better to be still than to speak when you are angry.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Humbleness is the heart of happiness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Explore the infinite possibilities in existence.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If we knew all the answers, we won’t ask questions.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Gray hair is the glory of a long life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I rise with every sunrise.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It is better to experience than to be told. But it is wiser to learn from the great sacred-souls.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A man is known his deeds.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Be like a fresh flowing stream.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Whatever you sow, you shall reap. It is better to sow good deeds; love, goodness and kindness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Those who never trial, never fails.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Celebrate every moment of your life. In one memorable day, you will be gone.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Money cannot buy love.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Discard negative comments, criticism and influences.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Death is the final destiny of every soul.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Search the truth for yourself.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
With inner peace, you are undisturbed by outside turbulence.
— Lailah Gifty Akita