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Animals Quotes

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Animals Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Dog Songs: Poems
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“Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).”

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Author:Zeena Schreck
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“There are many reasons why so many of us choose to share our lives with a pet--it's the perfect antidote for loneliness, providing an endless supply of smiles and the certainty of unwavering companionship, and many of us have seen the way a pet can make a family feel whole.”

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Book:Love Is the Best Medicine: What Two Dogs Taught One Veterinarian about Hope, Humility, and Everyday Miracles
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“Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I matured back into his son, I came to appreciate what he was saying -- an endearing and magnanimous reminder of how family will always be the sum of its individual members, be they human or animal.”

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Book:Ever By My Side: A Memoir in Eight [Acts] Pets
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“Review of Marlowe by Goodness C Nwaogazie 2023 "One thing I loved about the story was how well the author depicted Marlowe's life, reasoning, challenges, and adventures. This story shares the obstacles and triumphs that the family experiences together with Marlowe’s involvement." "The reader can see clearly and understand how it was affected by events so much that one begins to think Marlowe is human." "I recommend this book for lovers of action or adventure books, and young adult readers ages twelve and above. It will also make a great read for fantasy readers, as it tells a unique story.”

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Book:MARLOWE
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“I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that's a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.”

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Book:The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
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“You saw what I’ve done, Mom!!” bragged the child. “What was that creature anyway?!” “It was a snake, a venomous one, the Arabian-horned viper,” replied the mother, shaking in fear from what just happened. “You were lucky it was a young one,” “A snake, huh?!! Well, he got what he deserved,” said the fawn. “You called me brave and hero, so will you name me Shuja’ or Batal ?” “Neither,” said the mother, pulling her son into a hug, “I’ll call you Nader,” Nader means rare, one of a kind.”

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Book:The Desert Heroes
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“So when the man was only a few steps away, Robert did his best to imitate the yellow bird’s call. When the notes came out, they were not the same sound as the yellow bird’s – after all, they were sung in a frog’s voice. But whatever differences there were between his and the yellow bird’s sound, there was also an obvious likeness that was easy for the man to catch. For, by fate or good fortune, Robert had stumbled across a man who had a deep passion for music. And for a moment, the man froze in surprise at what he had just heard this small frog do.”

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Author:Steve B McGlaughlin
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“I think you did it because you were brave.” “Brave, is a big word, Robert! Too big. A word you would have to live up to if such a word was to find its way around to certain groups.” “But what you did was brave, Baz.” “But, Robert, the point is, I don’t remember how I did it. So please do not tell anyone what you saw – they will expect me to do it again. Can you imagine what might happen? And now look at my other leg. It’s shaking even more than the first one. I couldn’t run if I had to. You see what I face? Let’s head back now, in case the fox comes back.” “It won’t come back, Baz,” said Robert. “I wouldn’t.”

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Author:Steve B McGlaughlin
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“Jesus was a man of love, of immense compassion. He loved this earth, the people, the threes, because that is the way to love God. God is life. Jesus is very life-affirmative. He says total yes to life. When you look into the eyes of each being that you meet, you meet God. Everybody is an incarnation of God - the threes, the flowers, the rocks, the animals, the people and the mountains. Love the people, love the threes, love the animals - and through the love you meet God. All are brothers here, because God is one. The threes, the flowers, the birds and the rocks are all your brothers, because they all come from the one source. if you are not reconciled with the world, you cannot pray to God. Prayer is only possible when you are in harmony with existence. The whole existence is your brother. The first step for prayer is to be reconciled with your brother. And your brother means all beings. Jesus is a celebration of being, a celebration of life. If you deny life, you deny God. If you say no to life, you say no to God, because God is life. To understand Jesus, you have to understand that life is God. If you say yes to life, you will feel a prayer arising in your heart, a yes arising in your being. The ego is a no to life, the ego is a separation from life. The inner being is a yes to life. The inner being is a deep yes and acceptance of life. Saying yes bridges you with the whole. It makes you a part of the whole. Saying yes will make you more and more spiritual. Jesus whole message is yes. The word "amen" means yes. You will never meet God, you will meet human beings, animals, stones and threes. You can love God through other human beings, through threes, through stones and through animals. And when you have learnt to love God through all his forms - then only love changes into prayer.”

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Author:Swami Dhyan Giten
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“We care deeply for the creatures that depend on us, expecting nothing, really, and getting so very much from them. Loving them takes courage, because love requires daring. Daring to risk the pain of loss--and accepting that they will only ever be temporary in our lives. Mourning them when they are gone speaks of our bond with them, and our willingness to give loss its due--by feeling it fully, then recovering wisely. Our animals make us better people. We do not abuse our strength, and we do not deny our empathy.”

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Book:Valdemar
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“They're so weird and so beautiful," she said. "Like you," I said. I meant it as a joke, but Liz nodded. She felt that she was sort of like an emu herself, she said. Maybe that was why she'd had flying dreams ever since she was a little girl -- at heart, she was an emu. She was sure the emus also dreamed of flying. It was another thing they had in common. Both she and the emus wanted to fly -- they just didn't have the wings they wanted.”

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Book:The Silver Star
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“Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.”

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Book:You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
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“Fighting is found everywhere in the animal kingdom and nowhere so much as among human animals. Animals fight to get what they want--food, sex, territory, control, etc.--because there are other animals who want the same thing or who want to stop them from getting it. The same is true of human animals, except that we have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting our way. Being "rational animals," we have institutionalized our fighting in a number of ways, one of them being war. Even though we have over the ages institutionalized physical conflict and have employed many of our finest minds to develop more effective means of carrying it out, its basic structure remains essentially unchanged. In fights between brute animals, scientists have observed the practices of issuing challenges for the sake of intimidation, of establishing and defending territory, attacking, defending, counterattacking, retreating, and surrendering. Human fighting involves the same practices. Part of being a rational animal, however, involves getting what you want without subjecting yourself to the dangers of actual physical conflict. As a result, we humans have evolved the social institution of verbal argument. We have arguments all the time in order to try to get what we want, and sometimes these "degenerate" into physical violence.”

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Author:George Lakoff
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“Da jeg var liten tenkte jeg at alle dyr hadde fått utdelt hvert sitt ord; kyrne sa mø, hundene sa voff og så videre. Og jeg tenkte at de måtte uttrykke alle sine følelser, både de lykkeligste og de sørgeligste med variasjoner av dette ene ordet. Jeg tenkte at det var dette som skilte oss fra dyrene; at vi hadde fått alle ordene i verden og kunne bruke dem som vi ville. Vi får aldri sagt det vi vil si.”

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Book:Han ligner en måte å sove på
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“छुटकू गिलहरी ने देखा कि खेत में रहने वाला इंसान कागज के पुलिंदे में कुछ देख रहा था। छुटकू के मन में कई दिनों से दबी हुई जिज्ञासा उठ खड़ी हुई। वह जानना चाहती थी कि इंसान कागजों में क्या करता है। हर दिन की तरह उस दिन भी वह बहुत समय से कागज़ों में कुछ किए जा रहा था।”

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Book:चिखुरी
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“छुटकू गिलहरी को याद आ रहा था कि मम्मी ने सजीव और निर्जीव में फ़र्क बताया था। उन्होंने कहा था कि जीवित पेड-पौधों और जानवरों में लचक होती है। जीवित होना यानी लचक होना। अकड़ जाना मौत की निशानी है। उसने पेड़ की डाल से नीचे देखा, सूखी टहनियां और पत्ते अकड़े पड़े थे जबकि जिस हरे-भरे पत्तों वाली पतली-सी टहनी पर छुटकू बैठी थी, वह पत्तों से लदी हुई लचीली डाल थी। उसे बात समझ आ गई थी कि जीवित रहने के लिए लचीला होना ज़रूरी है।”

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Book:चिखुरी
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“अधूरा ज्ञान भयानक स्थिति पैदा कर सकता है। छुटकू को मम्मी की बात याद थी और पत्तियों के सहारे लटकते हुए जीवन का लचीलापन भी समझ आ रहा था। वह नहीं जानती थी कि उसकी यही समझ मुसीबत का कारण बनने वाली है। यहाँ ज्ञान तो था मगर अनुभव नदारद था।”

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Book:चिखुरी
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“चिखुरी को अभी खेत-खलिहान का फर्क समझ नहीं आया है। वह तो यह भी नहीं जानती की वह कहाँ रहती है! यह पेड़ कहाँ पर उगा हुआ है, यह कोई शहर है या गाँव है? दरअसल उसे यह जानने की ज़रूरत ही नहीं पड़ी कि वह धरती के किस हिस्से में रहती है। भूख के समय उसे भोजन मिल जाता है और प्यास लगने पर पानी का इंतज़ाम भी हो जाता है। इससे आगे की चिंता उसे अब तक हुई ही नहीं। अभी वह नहीं जानती कि मौसम बदलते भी हैं और बदलाव अपने साथ संघर्ष लाता है।”

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Book:चिखुरी
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“Strictly as a matter of taste, I do not like children. Small animals are adorable in the way my biology programs me to find large-eyed, small-skulled mammals adorable, and they can grow up into formidable or admirable creatures--cubs become bears, calves become elephants, fledglings become eagles. Babies lack language, which makes me bored and impatient, then turn into children, whose saccharine vocal emissions grate my nerves, and then turn into adult humans, the most monstrous of all animals.”

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Book:The Undocumented Americans
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“Language is the basis of culture and consciousness, so, once humans had language, they became capable of using culture to override biology (using memes to drive humanity rather than genes; using idea mutations rather than gene mutations) and thus freed humanity from animalism and instinct. The new dawn of consciousness, culture and knowledge had arrived.”

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Book:Children See Dead People: Children's Spooky Powers
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“We have been taught that life is a fight and a struggle. We have been taught to fight, because of the the idea that man has to continuously fight for his survival. We have been taught to fight, because of the idea that man and nature are enemies. Nature is not our enemy. Nature is our home. The universe is not antagonosiotic to us. The universe means the earth, which the universe fills with flowers, trees, animals, people, rivers and mountains. The universe is supporting them. Why would the flowers, the trees and the rivers otherwise grow? Man is part of this existence. But the idea that we have to fight creates a separation between us and the whole. Man becomes an isolated island. Then we live in fear, anxiety and worry. So how can we be happy? Instead we feel alienated, alone and meaningless, because the whole seems to be a constant fight and struggle. For the person who have been fighting with existence, death seems to be the ultimate thing. But for the person who have surrendered to existence, who is in tune with existence, death is not the ultimate thing. Surrender means to let go of your ego, so for him there is no death. It is only the egothat dies, because the ego is a separation from the whole. Itis the ego that fights with the whole. Surrender means to drop all that is superficial and shallow. Surrender means to become egoless. Surrender means that our heart starts to beat in tune with the universal heart. Instead of being an isolated island, we become part of the whole continent. And then we live in love, joy, silence, trust, truth, freedom and the eternal. Suddenly we know the joy and beauty of surrender. Surrender means to yes to the whole.”

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Book:Meditation: A Love Affair with the Whole - Thousand and One Flowers of Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Freedom, Beauty and the Divine
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“I had now also got to deal with the fate of my horses and my dogs... In the end I decided to give them to my friends. I rode in to Nairobi on my favourite horse, Rouge, going very slowly and looking round to the North, and the South. It was a very strange thing to Rouge, I thought, to be going in by the Nairobi road, and not to be coming back. I installed him, with some trouble, in the horse-van of the Naivasha train, I stood in the van and felt, for the last time, his silky muzzle against my hands and my face. I will not let thee go, Rouge, except thou bless me. We had found together the riding-path down to the river amongst the Native shambas and huts, on the steep slippery descent he had walked as nimbly as a mule, and in the brown running river-water I had seen my own head and his close together. May you now, in a valley of clouds, eat carnations to the right and stock to the left.”

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Book:Out of Africa
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“The zoo industry is full of such contradictions. It helps people learn about the importance of animals, but not what is vitally important to the animals themselves. Sea mammals, elephants, and primates are capable of so many amazing feats, but they are incapable of demonstrating their intentions and making their own choices. The industry encourages you to think that these animals are intelligent, but not intelligent enough to have the ability to resist. The industry encourages you to care about them, so that you and your children will return for a visit. But it does not want you to care so much that you might develop empathy and begin to question whether these animals actually want to be there.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. ... We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless--epically useless in my current state--but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either. People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox. ... But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. ... What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”

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Book:The Fault in Our Stars
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“EVERY DOG’S STORY I have a bed, my very own. It’s just my size. And sometimes I like to sleep alone with dreams inside my eyes. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why. But I’m no longer sleepy and too slowly the hours go by. So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. Everybody needs a safe place.”

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Book:Dog Songs: Poems
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“Animals are not supposed to have the power to reason and therefore don't care whether there is life after death. But imagine animals trying to cheer themselves up in the same way that our own ancestors did when faced with death, by believing that there is life after death. How would they resolve the problem that in the afterlife they might once more be eaten by man?”

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Book:The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir
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“Sweet Elephant of the Morning by Stewart Stafford O sweet elephant of the morning, What loud noise you make, With your leaden feet, And trumpet voice. You spray water, On your thick, dusty skin, And on anyone in proximity, To your body. Your trunk is a grey, reaching arm, And your tusks resemble curved lances, Or elongated walrus teeth, To fight off rivals. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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