Animal Consciousness Quotes

#1. A friend of mine in the ER told me that the animal consciousness is one of the here-and-now and that the human being can approximate it by drinking five martinis while soaking in a hot tub.

Thom Jones

#2. the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence

Ayn Rand

#3. The consciousness of the animal begins to change when it interacts with a human who's gone beyond thinking. It's not only the animals assisting us; we are also assisting the animals.

Eckhart Tolle

#4. Our intellect, our awareness, and our consciousness is the most powerful form of life on this planet. It's totally worthwhile. If our animal instincts stopped, we would die. We don't think about it, but if your consciousness were responsible for all of your bodily functions, you would die.

James McAvoy

#5. There seems to be no unexpressed self in animals, as if they are as fully themselves in flesh as possible, with no lag of consciousness to fill up, while we keep trying to grow into something else.

Jane Roberts

#6. I think that we are supernatural. We are unique. We're the only animals in the universe that we know of that actually have self-consciousness, a sense of time and our own mortality.

Anne Rice

#7. The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.

Karl Marx

#8. An animal of only instinct, Johnny Ferret, has in his actions drama, but no theater; theater requires that you draw a circle around the action and observe it from outside the circle; in other words, self-consciousness is theater.

Mary Ruefle

#9. [On New York:] ... a city rose before me. It was narrow and tall like a gothic temple, surrounded by water, and ... it suddenly appeared, as if with a slight push it detached itself out of the invisible into the visible.

Nina Berberova

#10. I passionately feel that as long as we view ourselves as superior and other animals as exploitable our consciousness will remain stuck in a level of ignorance that will disallow a full realization of the truth underlying reality.

Sharon Gannon

#11. An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.

Max Heindel

#12. However, current research in animal cognition, and on protolanguage, protomorality, ritual, and levels of consciousness, has shown that we may not be as unique as we think we are (cf. Peterson 1999: 283ff.).

J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen

#13. We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.

Stanislav Grof

#14. I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.

Kiki Smith

#15. The animals certainly like to be close to humans, especially as humans go through the shift in consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle

#16. Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses

Gary Snyder

#17. Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself.

Rollo May

#18. If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#19. The divine therapy helps us integrate our animal nature with the new possibilities of rational consciousness.

Thomas Keating

#20. Scientists have reported that elephants grieve their dead, monkeys perceive injustice and cockatoos like to dance to the music of the Backstreet Boys.

Hal Herzog

#21. My favourite movie right now is probably 'Hitch', a Will Smith thing.

Chris Moneymaker

#22. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

J.M. Coetzee

#23. I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only "want" toys or food the way a plant "wants" the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot

Sy Montgomery

#24. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.

Gene Wolfe

#25. Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.
Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Emil Cioran

#26. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

J.M. Coetzee

#27. If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

J.M. Coetzee

#28. Imagination is the bastard child of time and ignorance

Bernard Beckett

#29. You don't 'have' a life, you 'are' life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.

Eckhart Tolle

#30. The world's No. 1 tennis player spends 90 percent of his time winning, while the world's No. 1 golfer spends 90 percent of his time losing. Golfers are great losers.

David Feherty

#31. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#32. The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Edward Albee

#33. You can quickly go from having passion and love to passion and hate when an act of betrayal happens.

Robert Sternberg

#34. If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

Carl Sagan