Animal Quotes

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Martin Buber


Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.
Jean Cocteau



Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing—not unlike friends and wives.
Gerald Durrell




Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein




Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?
George Eliot

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Nora Ephron

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France




The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
Michael Friedman




The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mohandas Gandhi




Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
William Hazlitt



Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.
His Holiness The Dalai Lama




Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.
Benjamin Hoff,
The Tao of Pooh




Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being




I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.
Gary Larson


I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln



The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.
Ashley Montagu




Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.
Alfred A. Montapert