Sentient Being Quotes

#1. We are vegans not simply because being vegan will reduce suffering. We are vegan because every sentient being values her or his life even if no one else does. We are vegan because justice minimally requires that we not take life for trivial purposes.

Gary L. Francione

#2. Every sentient being values her/his life even if no one else does. That is what is meant by saying that the lives of all have inherent value.

Gary L. Francione

#3. If a man loses one-third of his skin he dies; if a tree loses one-third of its bark, it too dies. If the Earth is a 'sentient being', would it not be reasonable to expect that if it loses one-third of its trees and vegetable covering, it will also die?

Richard St. Barbe Baker

#4. A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Daniel Dennett

#5. Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

Antony Flew

#6. She thanked the toilet, but it did not respond. That was good - if she started to think of it as a sentient being, it would probably be much harder to poop in its mouth.

David Wong

#7. The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to do things to it which, were it a sentient being, would constitute torture.

Mary Roach

#8. Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.

Charles De Lint

#9. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.

Thomas Hardy

#10. There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

Frances Wright

#11. My brain needs to be a sentient being that way it can say, "Nadiyah. NADIYAH!! I know where you're going with this and you need to stop!

Nadiyah Abdul-Khaliq

#12. The true miracle lies in our eagerness to allow, appreciate, and honor the uniqueness, and freedom of each sentient being to sing the song of their heart.

Amit Ray

#13. I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

Peter Watts

#14. For the moment I can think of nothing - except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.

Henry Miller

#15. The Buddha's teaching leads us to the realization that we must always strive to harm no sentient being, human or nonhuman, whether or not it is in our selfish interest to do so.

Norm Phelps

#16. Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

Gary L. Francione

#17. It's probably weird to think about an addiction like it's a sentient being, but that's how it feels. Like it's something living inside you. Something you can't get rid of because killing it means killing you.

Ellen Hopkins

#18. A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.

Marty Rubin

#19. Just as a chariot is verbalized, in dependence on collections of parts, so conventionally a sentient being, is set up depending on the mental and physical aggregates

Gautama Buddha

#20. Like modern science, Buddhism holds the basic premise that, at the most fundamental level, there is no qualitative difference between the material basis of the body of a sentient being, such as a human, and that of, say, a piece of rock.

Dalai Lama XIV

#21. Fools! You think of "god" as a sentient being. God is the word used to represent a force. This force created nothing, it just helps things along. It does not answer prayers, although it may make you think of a way to solve a problem. It has the power to influence you, but not decide for you.

Diogenes

#22. Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.

Dalai Lama

#23. You have to treat your car with love. And I don't mean love of an object. You see, that's just wrong. That's materialism. You have to love your car like it's sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that's some deep-down agape love.

Sherman Alexie

#24. To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being. As Nietzsche claimed, one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect.

Stephen Batchelor

#25. Expectation loiters in the DNA of every sentient being; when you tell yourself or a loved one, 'Don't get your hopes up,' you're fighting ancient genetic programming.

Martha Beck

#26. For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

A.S. Byatt

#27. If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It's a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.

Gary L. Francione

#28. The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

#29. So, if an octopus is this smart," Steve asked Bill, "what other animals are out there that could be this smart--that we don't think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all these things?

Sy Montgomery

#30. We are all given a gift of existence and of being sentient beings, and I think true happiness lies in love and compassion.

Adam Pascal

#31. Being vegan is not just a matter of being 'kind' to animals. First and foremost, it is a matter of being just and observing our moral obligation to not treat other sentient beings as things.

Gary L. Francione

#32. When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Sogyal Rinpoche

#33. Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#34. The great thing about life-the most magnificent thing about being these sentient human beings-is that we have been given the power of choice.

Bryant McGill

#35. Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture.

Coleman Barks

#36. Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

Mahavira

#37. Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

Philip K. Dick

#38. To say that a being who is sentient has no interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being with eyes has no interest in continuing to see. Death - however "humane" - is a harm for humans and nonhumans alike.

Gary L. Francione

#39. Sentience is a means to the end of continued existence. Sentient beings, by virtue of their being sentient, have an interest in remaining alive; that is, they prefer, want, or desire to remain alive.

Gary L. Francione

#40. I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me.
Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

David Wong

#41. The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

Ruben Dario