Quotes About Anthropomorphism

Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.

Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I am finding, in writing about gardening: weeds don't just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned.

people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

If frogs had side pockets, they'd carry hand guns.

Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.

If thy predicates are anthropomorphisms, the subject is an anthropomorphism too.

When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.

Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees.

But you can reassure children; you can tell them what's happening or going to happen. Can you get such reassurance across to a cat? I suppose it is that sort of anthropomorphism that bugs the hell out of researchers whose job is to experiment on nonhuman animals. If they permit themselves such a comparison, they might not sleep well at night.

The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.