Quotes About Animals

Alexander McCall Smith

People who looked after animals were by and large kind people; they simply practised kindness, unlike those who made much of it. Thus, thought Isabel, are virtues best cultivated—in discretion and silence, away from the gaze of others, known only to those who act virtuously and to those who benefit from what is done.

Cattle had no vote, nor the words to express a view, but their feelings ranked above just about everything else in the country.

it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet—as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest.

There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing

So the fairies are wonderfully helpful for anything involving animals. They'll even help you find lost pets or locate a new one for adoption.

Fairies are animals' guardian angels.

Today it is widely recognized that the cells of animals were once a wild party of two if not three ancient beings: the oxygen-poisoned archaeon host, the oxygen-using bacteria that became mitochondria, and perhaps wildly squirming spirochetes, which abound in anaerobic environments.

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.

The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.

Traditional Blackfeet saw the natural world in terms of awe and mystery. Animals lived in metaphorical relationships to them; the creatures were other nations. Every plant and animal passed coded information to man. Part of the price western science has paid for analytical power is that it has transformed the natural world into something alien.

Humans are strongly discouraged fro comparing their lives with those of other animals. Yet everything I had experienced taught me that metaphor is the fundamental path of imagining, a first line of inquiry into the lives of other creatures that sheds light on our own.

Animals, Gerald felt by instinct, were his equals, no matter how small, or ugly, or undistinguished; they were, at a level beyond the merely sentimental, his friends and companions - often his only ones, for he had no great rapport with other children. And the animals, in their turn, sensed this, and responded accordingly, not just when he was a boy on Corfu but throughout all the years of his life.

Don't grumble! Don't stew! Some critters are much-much, Oh, ever so much-much So muchly much-much more unlucky than you!

Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.

Just watching an animal closely can take you out of your mind and bring you into the present moment, which is where the animal lives all the time - surrendered to life.

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.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.

God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?

It is a fact that plants also have life like animals. But animals are endowed with mind, and nervous systems too while the plants do not possess the same.

Dogs are high on life. Cats need catnip.

Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.

The spiders, honeybees, yellow jackets, and mud daubers: these insects still speak - a language that is older than humans. The buffalo, elk, wolf, coyote -they still talk too. It's we, the people, who have forgotten how to listen. [Osage Spider Story, an Osage Legend, told by Archie Mason, Jr]