Quotessence
Home / Topics / Animal Quotes

Animal Quotes

Browse 7249 quotes about Animal.

Related topics

Animal Quotes

“At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I'll have made more progress. At ninety I'll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive.”

“People who take the risk make a tremendous discovery: The more things you care about, and the more intensely you care, the more alive you are. This capacity for caring can illuminate any relationship: marriage, family, friendships-even the ties of affection that often join humans and animals. Each of us is born with some of it, but whether we let it expand or diminish is largely up to us. To care, you have to surrender the armor of indifference. You have to be willing to act, to make the first move.”

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all species are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

“Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways.”

“I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I'm lucky to be alive. My face was stitched back together and here I still am, gratefully so. I believe that experience shocked me into a deep alliance with the animal world, its beauty and viciousness and terror.”

“And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.”

“We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remains—we can't know.”

“There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins... Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?”

“What makes me feel alive is community, connectedness. Certainly family, parenting, relationships, friendship. All the way into colleague relationships and relationship with spirit, relationship with one's own self and inner child, and animals, earth, planet. Fostering and nurturing and really focusing on connection - connection in relationship with other and my own self and God. When I don't feel connected in all those three areas, life is not very good.”

“Film is very much about capturing the essence of things - if you feel it, and you've got the right person shooting it, it'll come across. Theater's a different animal; it's physically different and requires a different discipline. In the theater, you're mining the same material, constantly honing the same thing, executing it and keeping it alive and fresh.”

“Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual-and yet each continues to be an individual....here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed.”