Sentient Quotes

#1. Aenea heard the music of the spheres. She resonated with the Void Which Binds, which resonates in turn to sentient life and thought, and then she used the almost illimitable energy of the Void to ... to take the first step.

Dan Simmons

#2. Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.

D. A. Carson

#3. The Buddha and all sentient beings are not two.

Takuan Soho

#4. 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

#5. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes.

Dalai Lama XIV

#6. I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species.

Daniel H. Wilson

#7. 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

#8. Even if a bodhisattva investigates the highest wisdom, one is not a proper bodhisattva unless one applies skillful means for the benefit of other sentient beings.

Je Tsongkhapa

#9. The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale.

Paul Di Filippo

#10. If the room to which my bed was removed were a sentient thing that could give evidence, I might appeal to it at this day - who sleeps there now,

Charles Dickens

#11. Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.

Michael Morpurgo

#12. At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

Thomas L. Dumm

#13. 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

#14. Suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls.

Anne Rice

#15. Paraphrased: Among the degrees of the universal Manifestation, each sentient creature typically experiences an illusory sense of autonomy. At the same time, with or without the creature's awareness, the creature subsists eternally as an "immutable prototype" in the divine Knowledge.

Abdelkader El Djezairi

#16. The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.

Gary L. Francione

#17. All sentient beings have the seed of the Buddha within them.

Dalai Lama

#18. Those who greatly enlighten delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about enlightenment are sentient beings.

Kim Hee-jin

#19. Elijah Wood confirms his standing as the foremost actor of his generation ... Wood acts so eloquently with his sentient face and searching eyes that his job becomes one of concealing how redundant his spoken lines are - a tricky job he largely is able to bring off commendably.

Jay Carr

#20. Only where there is sentient life can there be feelings of pleasure and pain, sorrow or joy.

Max Heindel

#21. All sentient beings should have at least one right - the right not to be treated as property

Gary L. Francione

#22. For as long as space remains,
For as long as sentient beings remain,
Until then may I too remain
To dispel the miseries of the world.

Acharya Shantideva

#23. I could drive myself mad contemplating a great nothingness filled with a billion pinpoints of light and millions of drifting planets generating their myriad biological I=kingdom of insect, animal, sentient witness.

Anne Rice

#24. Factory farming is the attitude that commodifies sentient life.

Gene Baur

#25. It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

Stephen King

#26. 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

#27. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

Charles Darwin

#28. The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#29. 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

#30. I got body snatched by an alien." McClane grumbled a protest. "A sentient alien armor and weapons system," Riley clarified. "Very sophisticated. Very unique. Very much a smartass. His name's McClane

J. Fally

#31. Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

Jane Hirshfield

#32. All humans are sentient and sapient beings so they have the ability to perceive, think, and act using their knowledge, experience, insight, and conscience.

Debasish Mridha

#33. He probably thinks pixies are a lesser species. Half-sentient, like gnomes and Internet trolls.

Rainbow Rowell

#34. The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.

Annie Besant

#35. There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings - we all feel joy, we all deeply crave to be alive and to live freely, and we all share this planet together.

Mahatma Gandhi

#36. If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

Martin Gardner

#37. ... quite naturally, I am curious about behaviour which does not fit the natural patterns, which floats suspended at some unexplored level of the sentient sea and defies the tides and waves of society.

David Case

#38. Abram: .. One [Sentient] often believes it best to choose the higher path over the companionship of another. But, this circumstance draws to mind a point which Seers might forget to easily.
Lily: What's that?
Abram: That Love is the higher path

Jennifer DeLucy

#39. Vertigo, that's where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don't let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don't do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to do.

Maria Dahvana Headley

#40. Spiritual maturity is a natural part of sentient evolution

Jonathan R. Banks

#41. He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
French philosopher and writer.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

Marty Rubin

#43. If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence?

Jocelyn Gibb

#44. When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda.

Pema Chodron

#45. My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly.

Frank Rich

#46. 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

#47. Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.

Gary L. Francione

#48. 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

#49. We need to finally accept that all sentient creatures are deserving of basic rights. I define basic rights as this -the ability to pursue life without having someone else's will involuntarily forced upon you.

Moby

#50. Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Jacques Barzun

#51. Having abandoned the taking of life, refraining from killing, we dwell without violence, with the knife laid down, scrupulous, full of mercy, trembling with compassion for all sentient beings.

Gautama Buddha

#52. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

Sofia Samatar

#53. A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

Stephen Baxter

#54. So, apparently, if you are a pre-sentient mass of cells, this country will protect you and your rights to the n-th degree. If you have made the mistake of becoming an Iraqi citizen, apparently we can just drop bombs on you with impunity.

Janeane Garofalo

#55. So long as space remains
So long as sentient beings'
Suffering remains
I will remain
In order to help,
In order to serve.

Dalai Lama

#56. You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It's finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples.

James Luceno

#57. Civilization is very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics.

Amish Tripathi

#58. Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?

Dalai Lama

#59. I died from a mineral and plant became, Died from the plant, took a sentient frame; Died from the beast, donned a human dress - When by my dying did I ever grow less ...

Rumi

#60. 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

#61. On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.

Gore Verbinski

#62. As long as space endures, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world.

Dalai Lama XIV

#63. Industrial man - a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

Aldous Huxley

#64. It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient.

Greg Egan

#65. Han: "Someone ought to make armor out of those bugs."
Leia: "Han! They're sentient beings!"
Han: "Fair is fair. If they get to wear it, so should we."
- Han and Leia Solo

Troy Denning

#66. The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes upon them.

E. Hoffmann Price

#67. I have never really been fond of animals. I certainly wasn't an 'animal lover' when I became involved in the movement. I just came to be persuaded that animals should be treated as independent sentient beings, not as means to human ends.

Peter Singer

#68. What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature ... That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

Tom Wolfe

#69. sentient beings; that she had the karma to unite method and wisdom and benefit beings with him.

Thekchok Dorje

#70. I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.

Peter F. Hamilton

#71. As long as the sky exists And as long as there are sentient beings, May I remain to help Relieve them of all their pain.

Dalai Lama XIV

#72. We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus.

Philip Wollen

#73. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them?

John Green

#74. I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.

Stuart J. Russell

#75. Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It's thinking with your mind wide shut.

Bob Altemeyer

#76. Even when dreaming, if the sentient beings who dwell in the three lower realms are witnessed, then at that moment one should pray to sever the continuity of their negativity.
- Gathering of Precious Qualities

Pema Lungtok Gyatso

#77. We truly are all one tribe," said the iron-haired ghost softly. "Human, vampire, spirit, ghost - we're all sentient creatures bound to this planet. Why can't we work together in the face of something like this?

Anne Rice

#78. Consciousness is part of our nature as sentient beings, but doesn't mean we are aware at a particular moment. By perceiving our consciousness - becoming conscious of consciousness, we become aware.

Ilchi Lee

#79. I and the Great Earth and all sentient beings simultaneously attain enlightenment.

Stephan Schuhmacher

#80. All my contemporaries
hundred-and-fivers or convicts
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.

Anna Akhmatova

#81. Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.

Dogen

#82. Creation is a sentient and instinctual flow that determines where to go and what to change or omit.

Shaun McNiff

#83. It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.

Voltaire

#84. Motivated by compassion for all sentient beings, Buddha Shakyamuni observed all these problems, and he reflected on the nature of his own existence. He found that all human beings undergo suffering, and he saw that we experience this unhappiness because of our undisciplined state of mind.

Dalai Lama XIV

#85. That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

Fernando Pessoa

#86. Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.

Victoria Moran

#87. Any sentient entity who has lived, has changed.

Peter F. Hamilton

#88. I sighed and put Slayer between the front seats. "Stay here. Guard the car."
Saiman shut the door. "Is the sword sentient?"
"No. But I like to pretend it is.

Ilona Andrews

#89. All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families. - Charles Darwin

Rick Hanson

#90. In Buddhism, since the definition of "living" refers to sentient beings, consciousness is the primary characteristic of "life.

Dalai Lama XIV

#91. 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

#92. These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.

Richard Wagner

#93. The primary dues a writer or any artist pays is to remain sentient, and to forfeit the illusionary luxury of such anesthetics as avoidance, numbness, and denials.

Vanna Bonta

#94. I love all animals. I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales - sentient life - insects, reptiles.

Nicolas Cage

#95. 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

#96. The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings.

Wei Wu Wei

#97. For all of us with consciousness" - the Dalai Lama returned to his seat - "our life is very precious. Therefore, we need to protect all sentient beings very much. Also, we must recognize that we share the same two basic wishes: the wish to enjoy happiness and the wish to avoid suffering." These

David Michie

#98. The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila.

Frederick Lenz

#99. He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.

Jonathan Franzen

#100. We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

James A. Baldwin