Quotes about Animals

The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and the sky) instead.

The merciful provisions of the law extend even to the lower animals, which cannot express in words their want and suffering.

Your wrong habits of eating have so educated your moral powers that you have not the spirit of a Christian. Your temper is perverse, and your treatment of dumb [voiceless] animals is wrong.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals. They are just charming, and they have the kindest disposition and the politest ways; they never look sour, they never let you feel that you are intruding, they smile at you and wag their tail, if they've got one, and they are always ready for a romp or an excursion or anything you want to propose.

As regards his health--and the rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

Dogs go to heaven.

By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a noble animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward--you will never get her full confidence again.

It can truly be said: Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.