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Quotes

The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 500 BC

Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you.

—François Rabelais, 1535

In every man is a wild beast; most of them don’t know how to hold it back, and the majority give it full rein when they are not restrained by terror of law.

—Frederick the Great, 1759

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

—Alexander Pope, 1709

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it. 

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821

I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

—John Ruskin, 1860

Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

A bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 64

What delight can there be, and not rather displeasure, in hearing the barking and howling of dogs? Or what greater pleasure is there to be felt when a dog followeth a hare than when a dog followeth a dog?

—Thomas More, 1516

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men, but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

Life is no way to treat an animal.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 2005

It is remarkable that only small birds properly sing.

—Charles Darwin, 1871

Man and animals are really the conduit of food, the sepulcher of animals, and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead bodies.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500