Animals are good to think with.

A good dog, sir, deserves a good bone.

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.

Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.

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.

Alas! We are ridiculous animals.

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

Of all the creatures that breathe and creep on the surface of the earth, none is more to be pitied than man.

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals—except the weasel.

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

Life is no way to treat an animal.

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.

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.