Animal Existence Quotes

#1. They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn't, and it never was. It's about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear - a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.

Lauren Oliver

#2. I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.

Virginia Woolf

#3. If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.

Christopher Dawson

#4. Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

Randall Jarrell

#5. The introduction of cooking may well have been the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human.

Carleton S. Coon

#6. Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Immanuel Kant

#7. The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

George Eliot

#8. 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

#9. People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Soren Kierkegaard

#10. Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.

Emile M. Cioran

#11. I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits.

Alan Greenspan

#12. HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another - plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid. H

Alice Walker

#13. The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#14. It's an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it's the soul
But it's not the soul: it's the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing.

Alberto Caeiro

#15. Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.

Robert Smith

#16. Every existence contains its primal trauma, an event dividing life into a before and an after, a trauma so great that even the most furtive memory of it is enough to make an individual freeze in irrational, incurable, animal terror.

Amelie Nothomb

#17. Wild animals are only wild to save their existence...for their survival; but human animals are wild to do harm to their own species

Munia Khan

#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 purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature
all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn't care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes exinct.

Michael Crichton

#20. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question

Michel Foucault

#21. A spoken story is larger than one unheard, unsaid. In nearly all creation accounts, words or songs are how the world was created, the animals sung into existence.

Linda Hogan

#22. We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

Asa Gray

#23. Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains?

Jess Walter

#24. Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

Gerald Durrell

#25. People seem to deny the existence of animal emotions so that they can continue to justify inhumane treatment and exploitation and avoid the fact that our actions have a deep emotional impact on our fellow beings.

Stacey O'Brien

#26. Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#27. I remain too impressed with Freud's vision of the human animal's compromise with existence
the defense or deflection of our ego in knowledge of ourselves from what there is to know about ourselves
to suppose that a human life can get itself without residue into the clear.

Stanley Cavell

#28. TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own.

Ambrose Bierce

#29. It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.

Maimonides

#30. I grew up around animals [seven horses, dogs and now a pet goldfish named Leila] and I'm rebelling against them not having a natural existence.

Isabel Lucas

#31. What if I'm just a sick animal? A creature shuffled into existence here by the random whims of evolution. Nothing more. An existence totally without inherent meaning, totally without purpose. What

Tim McBain

#32. Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.

Samuel Johnson

#33. The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence-and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.

Van Jones

#34. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle.

Charles Darwin

#35. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Erich Fromm

#36. Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself
except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

Storm Jameson

#37. There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#38. Of all animals, the cat alone attains to the comtemplative life. He regards the wheel of existence from without, like the Buddha.

Andrew Lang

#39. The puma is, with the exception of some monkeys, the most playful animal in existence.

William Henry Hudson

#40. Until we boycott meat, and all other products of animal factories, we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel practices used in rearing animals for food.

Peter Singer

#41. A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.

Hannah Arendt

#42. We should take good care of the domestic animals we have brought into existence until they die. We should stop bringing more domestic animals into existence.

Gary L. Francione

#43. Let us investigate more closely this property common to animal and plant, this power of producing its likeness, this chain of successive existences of individuals, which constitutes the real existence of the species.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

#44. We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

Marcel Proust

#45. I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?

Guy De Maupassant

#46. Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal.

Albert Einstein

#47. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

C.S. Lewis

#48. I'm inspired by love, by the moments that we commit to something with all our heart - be it a person, a project, an animal, anything really. It's undeniably inspiring, that acknowledgment of existence, that I love, that I care. That fills me with purpose.

Damon Runyon

#49. Anthropocentrism, regarding human kind as the very center and pinnacle of existence, is a disease of arrested development.

Michael Fox

#50. Social existence remains a dream only because the thoughts and feelings of the human animal are blocked off from the simple and obvious.

Wilhelm Reich