#animal

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#man #peace #people #life

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree. ↗

— Miguel de Unamuno

#human #life

Sometimes i think you were a dolphin in a previous life, ↗

— Ben M. Baglio

#life

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#animal-cruelty #animal-kindness #animal-rights #animal-welfare #animals

I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses. ↗

— Yann Martel

#life

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. ↗

— Anatole France

#love #pets #love

Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning. ↗

— Melanie Joy

#animal-advocates #animals #apathy #defensiveness #social-condition

Some people say they love animals and yet harm them nonetheless; I'm glad those people don't love me. ↗

— Marc Bekoff

#consistency #ethics #love

Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#love #love

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#men