Animal Life Quotes

ANIMAL, n. An organism which, requiring a great number of other animals for its sustenance, illustrates in a marked way the bounty of Providence in preserving the lives of his creatures. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings. ~ Gerald Durrell

The purpose of God's calling ... is not to give His people a little enjoyment of the animal life and the vegetable life in Egypt; it is to bring them into a spacious land flowing with milk and honey. ~ Witness Lee

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young. ~ Kate Millett

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life. ~ Aristotle.

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses. ~ George Eliot

we should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary, - the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us. Such ~ Plato

Life is no way to treat an animal. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I hope that, in a small way, I am interesting people in animal life and in its conservation. If I accomplish this I will consider that I have achieved something worth while. And if I can, later on, help even slightly towards preventing an animal from becoming extinct, I will be content. ~ Gerald Durrell

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. ~ Herbert Spencer

Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years. ~ Alexander Graham Bell

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. ~ James Stewart

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life. ~ Jacob Bronowski

Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren. ~ Jules Michelet

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven. ~ Walter Lang

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out. ~ Jay Griffiths

Human fathers give human life, animal fathers give animal life, God the Father gives divine life. It's called grace. ~ Peter Kreeft

To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you. ~ Keith Richards

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored ~ Alice Walker

You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that we have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is vital not only for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself-a point that seems to escape many people. ~ Gerald Durrell

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics. ~ Hannah Arendt

Donald Watson, who founded The Vegan Society in 1944 and who lived a healthy, active life until passing on in 2005, maintained that dairy products, such as milk, eggs, and cheese, were every bit as cruel and exploitive of sentient animal life as was slaughtering animals for their flesh: "The unquestionable cruelty associated with the production of dairy produce has made it clear that lactovegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh-eating and a truly humane, civilised diet, and we think, therefore, that during our life on earth we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the 'full journey.'" He also avoided wearing leather, wool or silk and used a fork, rather than a spade in his gardening to avoid killing worms.

Let us instil in others the reverence or life that Donald Watson had and that he passed on to us. ~ Gary L. Francione

So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals. ~ Brian Morton

Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that - that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth. ~ Michele Bachmann

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. ~ Robert Lanza

It is an unfortunate fact that those people who are most eloquent in their demand for the conservation of animals are often those most eager to violate animal life at the first opportunity. ~ Andrew Linzey

I want to reconnect to my animal life. ~ Kesha

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life. ~ George Santayana

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Christian theology provides some of the best arguments for respecting animal life and for taking seriously animals as partners with us within God's creation. It may be ironical that this tradition, once thought of as the bastion of human moral exclusivity, should now be seen as the seed-bed for a creative understanding of animal liberation. ~ Andrew Linzey

For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion. ~ Gabor Mate

You know, until I caught a reference in an ancient manuscript, I thought cows were about the size of a chicken." Chickens and fish being the only animal life aboard, I'd thought so too until this moment. "You mean they're not?" He shook his head, and his hands sketched improbable dimensions. Now Ennio was frowning. "So . . . The rhymes were altered. I wonder why? ~ Les Johnson

These self-anointed intellectuals are people who think that those who believe in God and Jesus Christ, those who 'cling to their guns and their religion,' are a lower form of animal life, while they, themselves, have no problem whatever accepting Obama as a messiah and, in the past, deifying the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Let's face it, when you kneel in a church, you're accepting that there is something greater and wiser than yourself in the universe. When, on the other hand, you kneel to a left-wing politician, you're merely emulating Monica Lewinsky. ~ Burt Prelutsky

Everyone in this world perform their 'duty'. But when one performs the 'duty' and he also intimidates [scolds] someone in the process, he will reincarnate in the animal life form. If he carries out his duties with understanding, he will return to the human life form. And if he performs them with humbleness, he will reincarnate into the celestial world. ~ Dada Bhagwan

THEIR BELIEF. IT is a strange revelation to find that the natives believe in a common Creator, and that their race sprang from one man and woman. There is no mistake that this it; their belief. Their Creator's name is GNURKER. They allow that he has a wife, who gave birth to the first couple sent to populate the earth. When their God saw that this earth was fit for man, and that all animal life and fishes were plentiful, He caused an immense whirlwind, which reached from Heaven to earth, and sent down him son and daughter with full instructions in all manner of ceremonies. They were to name their children by four tribal names--Banaka, Boorung, Paljarri, Kymera--and thus observe the marriage laws. They were to strictly follow out His commands, and when they died, their and their children's spirits would be received into heaven. They were given control over the fishes of the waters, the birds of the air, all animals, insects, and every living thing--that ~ John G. Withnell

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal. ~ Michael Chabon

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

...the Vegetable World has a higher significance than either the education of man's intellect, or even the maintenance of animal life. With its sweet influences, man's heart, - his moral nature, is in intimate communion; and through them, God reveals himself to the soul in his most endearing attributes. By the teachings of the Vegetable World the tone of our moral being is affected in no small degree, and flowers are often interwoven with the web of human destiny. In a word, the heart of man is susceptible of no purer or more enduring earthly pleasure, than that which it experiences in its free communion with the exhaustless beauties of the Vegetable World. ~ Alphonso Wood

How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers? ~ Joseph Wood Krutch

Let it all be animal, my life and death, hard and clean like that, anything but human ... a lot I care, me with my red heart in the dark earth and my tattooed feet following the animal ways. ~ Vali Myers

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo

From beasts we scorn as soulless, In forest, field and den, The cry goes up to witness The soulessness of men ~ William Inge

A spiritual man should be a normal man, a sound man. God Himself is normal; He is not insane. In order to reach God, a spiritual person has to be divinely practical in his day-to-day activities. Spirituality does not negate the outer life. But we have to know that the outer life does not mean the animal life. The outer life should be the manifestation of the divine life within us. ~ Sri Chinmoy

There is nothing illogical in the desire of the "have-nots" to appropriate the wealth of the "haves"; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when "nature red in tooth and claw" is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice. ~ J.F.C. Fuller

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away. ~ Bram Stoker

There is no chronic disease to be found
among fish and animal life in the sea that
compares to those on land.
It is also known that all land animals
develop arteriosclerosis, yet sea animals
have never been diagnosed as
arteriosclerotic. ~ Maynard Murray

Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans. ~ Richard M. Nixon

All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light, the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles. ~ Voltaire

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self. ~ George Herbert Mead

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. ~ Sitting Bull

The offshore ocean area under U.S. jurisdiction is larger than our land mass, and teems with plant and animal life, mineral resources, commerce, trade, and energy sources. ~ Tom Allen

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age ... The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. ~ Rose Macaulay

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. ~ Zadie Smith

Everything in life is speaking in spite of its apparent silence. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Left alone, the earth maintains its own fertility, in accordance with the orderly cycle of plant and animal life. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal. ~ Victor Salva

Let me recall at this point Nietzsche's statements regarding classic and romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The point I would make - and which I believe was also Nietzsche's - is that form is the medium, the vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization. ~ Joseph Campbell

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth. ~ John Burnside

It is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter, at its natural temperature, as a source of energy for mechanical effect ... The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific enquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms. ~ Lord Kelvin

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures. ~ Winona LaDuke

It said that the major activities pursued on NowWhat were those of catching, skinning, and eating of the NowWhattian boghogs, which were the only extant form of animal life on NowWhat, all other having died long ago of despair. The boghogs were tiny, vicious creatures, and the small margin by which they fell short of being completely inedible was the margin by which life on the planet subsisted. So what were the rewards, however small, that made life on NowWhat worth living? Well, there weren't any. Not a one. Even making yourself some protective clothing out of boghog skins was an exercise in disappointment and futility, since the skins were unaccountably thin and leaky. This caused a lot of puzzled conjecture amongst the settlers. What was the boghog's secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learnt the language the boghogs spoke to each other they would have realized that there was no trick. The boghogs were as cold and wet as anyone else on the planet. ~ Douglas Adams

Why is the forest such an effective agent in the prevention of soil erosion and in feeding
the springs and rivers? The forest does two things: (1) the trees and undergrowth break up
the rainfall into fine spray and the litter on the ground protects the soil from erosion; (2)
the residues of the trees and animal life met with in all woodlands are converted into
humus, which is then absorbed by the soil underneath, increasing its porosity and waterholding
power. The soil cover and the soil humus together prevent erosion and at the same
time store large volumes of water. These factors -- soil protection, soil porosity, and water
retention -- conferred by the living forest cover, provide the key to the solution of the soil
erosion problem." (An Agricultural Testament) ~ Albert Howard

Loving someone isn't about what you can live with, accept or tolerate. For me, it's about the one person you can't live without. Too know that part of your life will never be the same without that one person being apart of it. ~ Piper Kay

We all need someone who invest money or time on us. ~ Pablo Lozano Brito

Work to make a living; serve to make a life. ~ Will Rogers

I was raised with Eddie Fisher as a father and Connie Stevens as a mother. It was sort of hard for me to pick anything else, because this was the life I knew. ~ Joely Fisher

And yet, if we were to inject truth serum into the communion wine in our churches, I think we might find that many of us dread life in the kingdom of God, not because we find it terrifying but because we find it boring. ~ Russell D. Moore

My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you - are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude. ~ C.G. Jung

Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live. ~ M. Scott Peck

I experienced a terrible sense of my own mortality as it struck me that during my life I would only remove and replace my glasses a specific number of times. The thought filled me with sombreness to the extent that I began to weep, removing my glasses so that I could wipe my eyes, thus adding one more to whatever the final number would have been; the realisation of which cheered me.

- A spectacular tale ~ John Hegley

Nobody as a destiny. I mean, nobody has some kind of inescapable path for their life. This mug was made from clay, and that clay could have been anything at all until somebody made it into a mug. People aren't mugs, we are clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of 'purpose' is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want. ~ Dan Wells

I look at it this way - I don't ever want to apologize for something i've said, but I want to be gracious enough to be ready to apologize if I ever need to. My answers to those questions have come gradually and after some trial and error. In my own life, personally and professionally, I've realized that being civil is an active decision that I get to choose to make several times a day. That's why I believe there's hope - civility is not extinct. It is a choice. ~ Dana Perino

The value of autonomy ... lies in the scheme of responsibility it creates: autonomy makes each of us responsible for shaping his own life according to some coherent and distinctive sense of character, conviction, and interest. It allows us to lead our own lives rather than be led along them, so that each of us can be, to the extent such a scheme of rights can make this possible, what he has made himself. ~ Atul Gawande

Automobiles have always been part of my life, and I'm sure they always will be. What is it about them that moves me? The sound of a great engine, the unity and uniqueness of an automobile's engineering and coachwork, the history of the company and the car, and, of course, the sheer beauty of the thing. ~ Edward Herrmann

Prefer punishment to disgraceful gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life. ~ Chilon Of Sparta

I have respected women from the beginning of my life. ~ Julio Iglesias

The external rest comes unexpected. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes, if you're willing to withstand a little pain in life, you might discover a pleasure that you never would have otherwise known existed. ~ Penelope Ward

When Christ is my hope, he becomes the one thing in which I have confidence. I act on his wisdom and bank on his grace. I trust his promises and I rely on his presence. And I pursue all the good things that he has promised me simply because I trust him. So, I am not manipulating, controlling, or threatening my way through life to get what I want, because I have found what I want in Christ. He is my hope. ~ Paul David Tripp

The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide. ~ Keri Hulme

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World. ~ Clive Barker

She smiled. Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao. ~ Ruth Ozeki

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world. ~ Richard Branson

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot. ~ Joseph Conrad

When it comes to the fearless life, the divine gives nothing freely ... save to those who freely give themselves to discovering the truth about their own fearless selves. ~ Guy Finley

Calling an animal and
having it come, planting something and having it grow, become essential. It is
proof that I exist. ~ Benazir Bhutto

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning. ~ Beth Pattillo

When you are aware that you are the force that is Life, anything is possible. Miracles happen all the time, because those miracles are performed by the heart. The heart is in direct communion with the human soul, and when the heart speaks, even with the resistance of the head, something inside you changes; your heart opens another heart, and true love is possible. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

Are you living up to your potential? God made you with potential - potential for greatness! If you do what you can do, and trust Him to do what you can't, you will grow into the person He gave you the potential to be! ~ Joyce Meyer

What became clear as I sat on my plastic chair and drank my instant coffee was that I had somehow found myself on the other side. I had crossed a bridge. Their struggle was no longer my struggle. It wasn't that I would ever stop grieving for Will, or loving him, or missing him, but that my life seemed to have somehow landed back in the present. ~ Jojo Moyes

Tyler is who I generously offer, at school, in life, on YouTube. Mathew is what my parents and siblings call me...I've always been both, and to some people I'm more than the other." (pg 4) ~ Tyler Oakley

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home. ~ Alice Munro

I'm always coming up against scepticism in my life. ~ Geri Halliwell

This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. ~ Tracy K. Smith

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive. ~ George Eliot