Animal in Nature Quotes
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These quotes focus on how animals are related to nature, environmentalism, and also, humanity's part in this relationship.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
-Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
-Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Man, when living, is soft and tender; when dead, he is hard and tough. All animals and plants when living are tender and delicate; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.
-Lao Tsu
-Lao Tsu
We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
-Alice Walker
-Alice Walker
Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.
-Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
-Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The combined outrage of the millions of creatures which have suffered at the hands of man may well combine to haunt us. We are all of the same family, though destiny has assigned us to different roles: in our relationship with animals, we should regard them as different, not inferior.
-Dennis Bardens
-Dennis Bardens
The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
-Sam Walter Foss
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
-Sam Walter Foss
I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.
-John Muir
-John Muir
God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.
-Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
-Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
My own eyes are not enough for me...I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough...I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment In Criticism
-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment In Criticism
It was not that I disliked people; some of them were interesting and kind. But even the nice ones were no more compelling or important to me than other creatures. Then, as now, to me humans are but one species among billions of other equally vivid and thrilling lives. I was never drawn to other children simply because they were human. Humans seemed to me a rather bullying species, and I was on the side of the underdog.
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
-Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
-Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
-Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The disappearance of living species is not just a blow to orchid growers, butterfly collectors, and beetle buffs. It is an irremediable loss of precious information, the biological equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria in 641. It is the destruction of a large part of the book of life before it can be read, the irreplaceable loss of vital clues to biological evolution and our own history. Resources of potentially great practical benefit may be lost. With each daily shrinking of the biosphere, a valuable source of food or a molecule that could have cured malaria, AIDS, or some other scourge may be vanishing forever.
-Christian de Duve, "Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative"
-Christian de Duve, "Vital Dust: Life As a Cosmic Imperative"
Ladies and gentlemen, I do think we sometimes need to be reminded ourselves that our own species has become immensely more powerful than any that has ever existed on earth. We have transformed the face of the land and spread our pollution far and wide, but surely we have, somehow, to find the space and maintain the conditions in which a wide variety of other species can flourish and evolve. I happen to believe that technology should be the servant of mankind and not the master...Yet can we really go on behaving in such a cavalier way and still call ourselves civilized and responsible human beings?
-HRH Charles Prince of Wales, from a speech given December, 1995 quoted in Chris Howes' The Spice of Life, 1997
-HRH Charles Prince of Wales, from a speech given December, 1995 quoted in Chris Howes' The Spice of Life, 1997
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