Top 100 Animal Nature Quotes
#1. Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.
Adriaan Kortlandt
#2. A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.
Gunter Blobel
#3. Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.
Robert Bellarmine
#4. It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all.
Stevie Smith
#5. Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.
Jules Michelet
#6. Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
James A. Michener
#7. Nature gives liberty even to dumb animals.
Tacitus
#8. It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed,
but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed.
Jasmine Jean
#9. Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system
Bill Mollison
#10. There is no question that Francis was in advance of his age, as he anticipated all that is liberal and sympathetic in modern times: the love of nature, the love of animals, the sense of social compassion, the sense of the spiritual dangers of affluence.
Henryk Skolimowski
#11. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.
Bill Nye
#12. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
Henry Beston
#14. As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals.
Nathaniel Altman
#15. MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.
Ambrose Bierce
#16. Although the works of the Creator may be in themselves all equally perfect, the animal is, as I see it, the most complete work of nature, and man is her masterpiece.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#17. Man prides himself on being the only animal who can modify his nature, yet when he chooses to do so he is called a phony.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#18. After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
Bill McKibben
#19. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.
Aristotle.
#20. We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
Stephen Jay Gould
#21. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?
Joy Williams
#22. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
Terry Tempest Williams
#23. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#24. Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.
Carl Linnaeus
#25. Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.
Konrad Lorenz
#26. Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#27. To me nature is ... spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plans, and animals eating ... It's like an enormous restaurant, that's the way I see it.
Woody Allen
#28. Animals we are, and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration and happiness, if there be such a path, lies through our animal nature.
Dora Russell
#29. Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.
Tacitus
#30. I had always dreamed of being involved in a job where I could do anything related to animals and nature. A vet maybe. But later I came to understand that it was just a temporary interest and that music was more important to me.
Tarkan
#31. No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings.
Ellsworth Huntington
#32. You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
Tom Stoppard
#33. Man is by nature a curious animal. You can hide the truth from him temporarily, but not for ever.
Teodor Flonta
#34. They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
Rebecca Solnit
#35. The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature, we call in man wretchedness
by which we recognize that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.
Blaise Pascal
#37. To grow a sanctuary from seedlings takes time. But time has a way of going faster than you realize, and before you're aware of it you'll be rewarded hundredfold for your efforts.
David Kline
#38. Early humans, bursting with questions about Nature but with limited understanding of its dynamics, explained things in terms of supernatural persons and person-animals who delivered the droughts and floods and plagues ...
Ursula Goodenough
#39. I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons.
Will Rogers
#40. When we reflect upon the cruelties daily practised upon such of the animal creation as are given us for food, or which we ensnarefor our diversion, we shall be obliged to own that there is more of the savage in human nature than we are aware of.
Samuel Richardson
#41. Farmers today keep themselves in ignorance of the needs and true nature of pigs precisely because to know would put their conscience in a terrible bind. Wilful ignorance of this kind is no better than complicity.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
#42. We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.
Mark Fisher
#43. Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing.
Mary Gaitskill
#44. An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#45. Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn't. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he'd turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn't Fancy; he was a farmer.
Sandra Neil Wallace
#47. Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.
Winifred Holtby
#48. It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.
Maria Montessori
#49. The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.
Thomas Paine
#50. Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal
Frans De Waal
#51. 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
#52. It's human nature, we take a mile when we're given an inch. We're crazy. You see what we did to the animals! They don't even exist anymore!
Vince Staples
#53. I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J.M. Coetzee
#54. The animal kingdom is destined by nature to serve, and that service is fulfilled in alleviating the temporal and physical needs of man; the animal spirit or soul is limited by time - it dies with the body.
Saint Bernard
#55. What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature--which is worth a hundred in any Zoo--must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearance in prisons. ... How do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
#56. Man is by nature a political animal.
Aristotle.
#57. The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.
Jodi Picoult
#58. Boyishness - by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker.
Thomas Hughes
#59. The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.
Edward Gibbon
#60. The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#61. Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.
Sri Aurobindo
#62. Animals have always left me with a curiosity about human nature. I trust animals more than most people.
Pamela Anderson
#63. Don't allow your animal nature to rule your reason.
Rumi
#64. Being surrounded by nature and animals always kept me grounded and happy.
Alison Eastwood
#65. It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.
David Brin
#66. Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being?
Gregory Maguire
#67. In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
George Santayana
#68. 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
#69. Is there a more mysterious idea than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of animals?
Franz Marc
#70. 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
#71. When we return wild animals to nature, we merely return them to what is already theirs. For man cannot give wild animals freedom, they can only take it away.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#72. We are developing all sorts of technologies based on what we have learnt from birds, animals and soils. Pollination is worth £billions. But it also highlights how nature is so interconnected.
Tony Juniper
#73. God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, And, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.
Anonymous
#74. After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stuport, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#75. The magic begins in you. Feel your own energy, and realize similar energy exists within the Earth, stones, plants, water, wind, fire, colores, and animals.
Scott Cunningham
#76. We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others - both human and animal.
Gregory Colbert
#77. The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.
Robert Buettner
#78. Primates are the only animals on the face of the earth that can taste sweet and see color. We were designed by nature to see, grasp, eat, and enjoy the flavor of colorful, sweet fruits.
Joel Fuhrman
#79. Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.
E. O. Wilson
#80. It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.
Aristotle.
#81. First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.
Victor Hugo
#82. The awe-inspiring beauty of nature is nothing more than being flabbergasted by our ignorance of it. Good art produces the same effect; and the worst thing an artist can do is to follow the herd, because domesticated art is about as dynamic as a domesticated animal.
Anthony Marais
#83. Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature.
Will Tuttle
#84. Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
#85. He wasn't terrified of nature's realities for he was naturally a good animal and instinctively knew how to survive.
Tom Omstead
#86. Man ... is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
Plato
#87. Predation is so fundamental to nature that it seems absurd to demonize it for any animal, including humans.
Jackson Landers
#88. Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.
John Dewey
#89. A man recovers best from his exceptional nature - his intellectuality - by giving his animal instincts a chance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#90. It's in the nature of the humans and the entire animal kingdom to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. But what makes us true humans is the power to not hit back.
Abhijit Naskar
#91. The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life.
Aristotle.
#92. Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses ... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#93. Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.
Wislawa Szymborska
#94. Their song reminds me of a child's neighborhood rallying cry - ee-ock-ee - with a heartfelt warble at the end. But it is their call that is especially endearing. The towhee has the brass and grace to call, simply and clearly, "tweet". I know of no other bird that stoops to literal tweeting.
Annie Dillard
#95. The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals
Swami Vivekananda
#96. There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
John Locke
#97. ...rewilding is all about being nice, kind, compassionate, empathic, and harnessing our inborn goodness and optimism. We must all work together at this. It's about time we focus on the good side of human and animal nature. ... nature offers many lessons for kinder society. Blood shouldn't sell.
Marc Bekoff
#98. Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
Northrop Frye
#99. Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves ... and other animals.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#100. When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
Dag Hammarskjold
