Sentient Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy.

Jason Silva

#3. 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

#4. You can build a brain the size of a room, theoretically. You could also build a silicone based life form and it could be sentient. There's no limit to the height that you can reach in terms of design once we figure out how to design things, theoretically.

Neill Blomkamp

#5. Isn't that weird?" I said. "All the different types of sentient species in the universe, and we're all different, but we all drink coffee.

John Scalzi

#6. Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all it's many forms. Dwell peacefully as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them great joy.

Amartya Sen

#7. I believe we are the only sentient beings in the universe, and I believe that 500 years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around.

Joss Whedon

#8. 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

#9. Do you think the Dear Leader's line should be read 'Love knows no replacement,' as if it's unthinkable to search for a substitute for love, or 'Love knows no replacement,' suggesting that love is sentient and is itself at a loss to comprehend its absence?

Adam Johnson

#10. Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.

Michael Shermer

#11. We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.

Chogyam Trungpa

#12. Veganism is about nonviolence:
nonviolence to other sentient beings;
nonviolence to yourself;
nonviolence to the earth.

Gary L. Francione

#13. From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

Douglas Kennedy

#14. I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend,
that together we may succeed in building a better world
through human understanding and love,
and that in doing so we may reduce
the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

Dalai Lama XIV

#15. Completely trusting a way that you can't do by yourself, that you do with all sentient beings, is immediate liberation.

Reb Anderson

#16. We didn't-?" I whisper, my mouth drying in mortified horror as I can't complete the question. I stare at my hands.
"Anastasia, you were comatose. Necrophilia is not my thing. I like my women sentient and receptive," he says dryly.

E.L. James

#17. 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

#18. We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering.

Seneca The Younger

#19. If you want to help sentient beings, you have to get your hands dirty.

Guo Jun

#20. Occult powers, on the other hand, are much wider-ranging. They involve the ability to change dimensional structures and the evolutionary path of sentient beings.

Frederick Lenz

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. You never chased a sentient into his own environment unless you absolutely had to and you had sufficient forces to handle ten times the force you could see. Break that rule at your peril, as the poor screaming bastard in the water was now learning.

Evan Currie

#25. Wordless is not the same of expressionless. All phenomenon of the universe, audible and inaudible, tangible and intangible, sentient and insentient, are the clear and ceaseless expression of the buddha nature.

John Daido Loori

#26. You have no idea the power generated each time somebody is told a story. When a conscious, sentient mind willingly ignores what is real, what is fact, and instead chooses to invest in people and places that never existed ... It's magnificent.

Derek Landy

#27. I'm always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

Jane Goodall

#28. For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings.

Dalai Lama XIV

#29. We and all sentient beings fundamentally have the buddha nature as our innermost essence ...

Sogyal Rinpoche

#30. Animals are sentient creatures. I love them very much. I do not feel that we have the right to torture, murder, and abuse them for our own disgusting dietary and fashion wants and needs.

Davey Havok

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. What marks the transition from non-sentient to sentient beings? A model of increasing complexity based on evolution through natural selection is simply a descriptive hypothesis, a kind of euphemism for "mystery," and not a satisfactory explanation.

Dalai Lama XIV

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Gary Hamel

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

Coleman Barks

#38. I think the occasional appearance of the UFO is a very oblique pop-cultural reference that anyone who was alive and sentient in the late 1970s will get right away.

Hank Stuever

#39. The best way to eliminate all suffering in the world would be to eliminate all sentient life. If there were no living things capable of feeling pain, then there would be no pain.

Nigel Warburton

#40. Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?

Anne Rice

#41. 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

#42. Schneider's characters, like Kundera's, are sentient and sophisticated figures at a time when the constraints of Communist rule persist but its energy has entirely vanished.

Richard Eder

#43. 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

#44. Extend the boundaries of the glowing kingdom of your love, gradually including your family, your neighbors, your community, your country, all countries
all living sentient creatures.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#45. All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings ... And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness

Ken Wilber

#46. 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

#47. I'm hoping what all sentient beings hope ... that somehow I'm part of something larger than myself, in which I play a role, an actual role that is somehow intended and meaningful.

Anne Rice

#48. 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

#49. There are two rules of action for all sentient beings, for all galaxies, and for all time. Where these rules are honored, above and beyond the manufactured laws of government, there is always peace, freedom and abundance. The first rule of action is: Feed the poor.

Robin Gregory

#50. Aren't you sentient human beings? Or are you living like animals for the moment only? In that case by all means indulge in charity and cure each petty suffering that meets your eye; but don't meddle with the revolution, for its task is to cure all sufferings present and to come.

Albert Camus

#51. It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible.

Dimitar Sasselov

#52. May I quickly attain complete enlightenment, and having attained the state of a buddha, may I guide all sentient beings to liberation and the awakened state itself.

Tulku Urgyen

#53. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen.

Cormac McCarthy

#54. No true search for enlightenment ignores the suffering of other sentient beings. Ever. We simply need to create a way to address that suffering while remaining in a blissful center.

Marianne Williamson

#55. Besides," said Rigg-the-killer, "I don't want to leave the future of the human race on both planets in the tiny little hands of the sentient mice of Odinfold.

Orson Scott Card

#56. 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

#57. May all sentient beings be happy and free of suffering.

Gautama Buddha

#58. I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do. I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.

Cesar Chavez

#59. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,

Tom Holt

#60. I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.

Susan Orlean

#61. Through true honestydeeply believethat all sentient-beings are one.That all beings have the sametrue nature,wisdom,virtue.

Gautama Buddha

#62. What I love about 'Big Hero 6', with Baymax himself - this sentient creature who's actually a learning robot - with each experience, this naive and gullible creature becomes more aware of issues.

Roy Conli

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Music can make the cerebral accessible, the subconscious hummable. It communicates our shared needs and desires as sentient beings better than any other medium.

Nellie McKay

#66. I realized that all animals, not just dogs and cats and horses, were sentient beings; therefore, I just couldn't say I love animals and then eat them.

William McNamara

#67. Puberty," it has been said, "is everyone's first experience of a sentient madness.

Stacy Schiff

#68. My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

Sugata Mitra

#69. 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

#70. There is no moral distinction between fur and other materials made from animals, such as leather, which also is the result of the suffering and death of sentient beings.

Gary L. Francione

#71. The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it

Erwin Schrodinger

#72. Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.

George Pattison

#73. It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.

Alastair Reynolds

#74. When I wash my feet May all sentient beings Attain the power of supernatural feet With no hindrance to their practice. Of

Ruth Ozeki

#75. If you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

Dalai Lama XIV

#76. The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we're not built to eat a lot of meat.

Grace Slick

#77. The logical conclusion to a compassionate and respectful relationship to sentient animals is that we stop eating them.

Jonathan Balcombe

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

Daniel Dennett

#79. To say that 'I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free' is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers.

Hakim Bey

#80. Dear reader. Dear, dear reader. Here we find ourselves, you and me, engaged in a book in which someone has just exclaimed, in all seriousness, 'The sentient lobsters!'
How did we end up here? Did we make some mistake along the way?

M T Anderson

#81. Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.

Paul Davies

#82. When there's hunger you don't share out your food, you just devour the weakest ones. This practice works among wolves, since it lets the healthiest and strongest individuals survive. But among sentient races selection of that kind usually allows the biggest bastards to survive and dominate the rest.

Andrzej Sapkowski

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. A mind wishing to benefit other people and other sentient beings is the very basis of peace and happiness.

Dalai Lama

#86. I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed but what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals.

John Green

#87. To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.

Mary Oliver

#88. Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind - and her relationship to other sentient beings - above whatever else she might achieve in life.

Ethan Nichtern

#89. 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

#90. What we want is happiness, but if in pursuit of our own personal happiness we ignore the welfare of other sentient beings and only bully and deceive them, the results will be negative.

Dalai Lama XIV

#91. 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

#92. Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke.

Neil Gaiman

#93. 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

#94. Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

Vernor Vinge

#95. 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

#96. May I be mindful both making and keeping commitments that they be springboards to liberation, instead of suffering, for all sentient beings.

Gay Hendricks

#97. 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

#98. The most important thing about dreams is the existence in them of magical emotions, to which waking consciousness is not ordinarily sentient. Awe of vast constructions; familiar eternal halls of buildings; sexual intensity in rapport; deathly music; grief awakenings, perfected lodgings.

Allen Ginsberg

#99. New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths, Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts.

Sri Aurobindo

#100. All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

Mahavira