Quotes About Beasts

Are men and beasts of the same category? Is there no essential difference between them in respect to the quality of their value?…It is an offense to the majesty of the human spirit; for if any man deserves to be regarded as of the same quality as a beast of burden, then no man has any dignity left.

A criminal who, having renounced reason ... hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security.

Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.

The beasts tossed their heads and answered with evil horsey laughter.

For it was there, among the fanciful beasts, under all the glimmering stars in the clear night sky, and amidst a sprinkling of pink rose petals that the Duke and Duchess of Belmore made magic.

They were huge, six feet long not including the tail, and as high as my belly at their shoulders. Their entirely human eyes shone, as did their bared fangs.

For years now I've found the Earth haunted. Azoological beasts rage in untraceable configurations. They're called governments. Wounds made that never heal on every acre and covered with the scar tissue of our living existence. The argument at bedrock: I don't want to live on Earth but I don't want to die.

But any creature has life. Man is special and unique among the beasts because we have the ability to reason. I think that is our Divine gift. I feel the Gods are likely angered by any man who refuses to claim the Divine birthright of a rational mind.

Come try my strength, you dogs who thought to attack helpless prey! But when you do, O beasts of night, know that you face the Lord of Night. I am Death!

Alas for the dreamer : the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.

Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.

There are lots of idealists around who will say, 'Have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for - even dying for. If not, we are worse than the beasts of the field - and have sunk into barbarity.' Then you say, 'That's all right. Let's be barbarous - just as long as we don't have war.

So that her stubborn passion for the One—as if, in this miniscule grain of dust, she had conquered the Universe and closed herself off to everything else—is immediately enlarged, as if she felt that all things were speaking a new language, with the voice of the beloved's life—with everything close to her heart down to the last of the beasts of the field.

Man, says Protagoras, now has the wisdom necessary for life ... but he does not have political wisdom. At this point, people are living spread out and hence are at the mercy of stronger animals, who begin killing them off.... They seek to save themselves from the beasts by banding together and forming cities. But they do injustice to one another, at such close quarters, because they lack the political art. So, dispersed once more, they begin perishing again.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lovers, for instance, would the singular syllables wuther-quotle-glug have signified?

all the beasts from sloth to pigmy shrew, arrayed silently in ordered cavalcade as if waiting admission to the Ark.

The second spell I cast beneath it. It was an enchantment woven into the island itself, every bird and beast and grain of sand, every leaf and rock and drop of water. I marked them, and all the generations in their bellies, with Telegonus' name. If ever she did break through that smoke, the island would rise up in his defence, the beasts and birds, the branches and rocks, the roots in the earth.

I sat on the rocks and thought of the stories I knew of nymphs who wept until they turned into stones and crying birds, into dumb beasts and slender trees, thoughts barked up for eternity. I could not even do that, it seemed. My life closed me in like granite walls.

In his eyes, as in the eyes of all Forsytes, the pleasure of seeing these beautiful creatures in a state of captivity far outweighed the inconvenience of imprisonment to beasts whom God had so improvidently placed in a state of freedom! It was for the animals' good, removing them at once from the countless dangers of open air and exercise. Indeed, it was doubtful what wild animals were made for but tobe shut up in cages! The Man of Property, p. 191

So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

The Gods love their monsters.

So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.