Top 100 The Only Animal Quotes
#1. Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.
William Ernest Hocking
#2. 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
#3. Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson
#4. Man is the only animal who blushes...or needs to.
Mark Twain
#5. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm
#6. Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.
Douglas Coupland
#8. The horse is the only animal into which one can bang nails.
Jules Renard
#9. Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
Colin Wilson
#11. Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#12. Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.
Robert A. Heinlein
#13. Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses? She was near again.
Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone. She drew a breath. This is why humans are the only romantic animal!
Miranda July
#14. Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.
Mark Twain
#15. Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. Man is the only animal that can be bored.
Erich Fromm
#17. Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn't have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.
Dale Carnegie
#18. 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
#19. Man is the only animal that knows he's going to die, so we invent a heaven to keep from going crazy. Most people are hypnotized by organized religion from Childhood.
Grace Slick
#20. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay only once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves.
Miguel Ruiz
#21. Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid ... There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party ...
George Bernard Shaw
#22. Mamoon went on, "The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction." He raised his glass. "All the best then, my friends. Here's to a happy apocalypse."
"Happy apocalypse," murmured the other guests, obediently.
Hanif Kureishi
#23. Man is the only animal on earth intelligent enough to invent God and foolish enough to believe in Him.
Manoj Vaz
#24. Man is the only animal to borrow tools.
Tim Allen
#25. Man is the only animal that when you pat him on the head, his head swells up.
Charles R. Swindoll
#26. They say that cats are the only animal that can sit in your lap and ignore you. To which I say: you've never been to the Spearmint Rhino.
Dana Gould
#27. Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight
Mark Twain
#28. Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.
Aristotle.
#29. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans - language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
Paul Bloom
#30. Man is the only animal that strives to be more than he is....it is the indomitable spirit within that makes him human.
Steven Lang
#31. Man is the only animal who enjoys the consolation of believing in a next life; all other animals enjoy the consolation of not worrying about it.
Robert Breault
#32. There are millions of animal species but, man is the only animal capable of destroying them all.
Anthony D. Williams
#33. Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
Henry George
#34. Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human - the only animal that's got it - , bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.
Philip Levine
#35. The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
David Suzuki
#36. Man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain ... No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial
Arthur Schopenhauer
#37. Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt's the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.
Aracelis Girmay
#38. The ostrich is the only animal officially endowed with political direction.
Pierre Daninos
#39. Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.
Mark Pagel
#40. The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.
Glen Duncan
#41. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#42. New Rule: A dog is the only animal that can get you laid. No offense, parrot guy, but it's not gonna happen. When women see you, they're not thinking, "I bet that guy is interesting," they're thinking, "That bird better not shit on my dress.
Bill Maher
#43. Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down.
Swami Vivekananda
#44. Humans are the only animal who can have sex over the phone.
David Letterman
#45. You are judging demons and beasts unfairly. The only animal capable of such cruelty walks on two legs and arrogantly thinks that he was created in image of God.
Juraj Cervenak
#46. Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher's knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.
Mark Haddon
#47. The cat is the only animal without visible means of support who still manages to find a living in the city.
Carl Van Vechten
#48. Americans! They want to go 600 miles an hour, and they don't know how to walk! Look at them in the street. Bent over. Coughing! Young men with gray faces! Why can't they look at the animals? Look at a cat. Look at any animal. The only animal that doesn't hold its stomach in is the pig.
Joseph Pilates
#49. man is the only animal that is clever enough to build the empire state building and stupid enough to jump off.
Rock Hudson
#50. Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.
John Muir
#51. Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
#52. The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.
Hanif Kureishi
#53. Man is the only animal that can be skinned more than once.
Jimmy Durante
#55. When humans act with cruelty we characterize them as "animals", yet the only animal that displays cruelty is humanity.
Anthony D. Williams
#56. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. - William Hazlitt
M.C. Beaton
#57. Man is the only animal that strikes his women-folk.
Jeannie Gunn
#58. My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.
Louise Leakey
#59. Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Mark Twain
#60. Man is the only animal species capable of conceiving the notion of his own disappearance, and the only one capable of the despair that notion brings. What a strange race: so savagely determined to destroy itself, so savagely intent on preserving itself.
Robert Merle
#61. Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#62. We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Geraldine Brooks
#63. But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#64. Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.
Jean Kerr
#65. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.
Daniel M. Gilbert
#66. Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their 'evil' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it
Camille Paglia
#67. If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.
Carl Sagan
#68. You know, I like to think my life is kind of like the books I read, only I'm the author. I can write the story I want. The future can be anything I want it to be." He moved his head side to side, considering my words. "That works, as long as your story has a blond stud that fucks like an animal.
Adriana Locke
#69. Humans are the only animals that draw ... Practically every human being draws at some time in childhood.
Peter Steinhart
#70. No, amusing me only, I wonder if they realize how they are used?"
"Not a bit. They think they are the emperors of creation."
"Poor lambs."
"That's not how I'd describe them."
"I was thinking of animal sacrifice."
"Ah. That's closer.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#71. Only when I heard her bedroom door open and close did I give in to my beast instincts and do a wild animal dance around the room.
Alex Flinn
#72. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
Edward Abbey
#73. 'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings and this commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.
Leo Tolstoy
#74. A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!
Marc Bekoff
#75. Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.
Dean Koontz
#76. The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.
Edward Albee
#77. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice - as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings.
Magda Szabo
#78. A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.
Kiran Desai
#79. Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.
Noah Hawley
#80. Astrid or Aphrodite, she is my Circe. only instead of turning a man into an animal, she has made the animal human
Zarek
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#81. If you're going to kill the animal it seems only polite to use the whole thing.
Fergus Henderson
#82. Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.
David Quammen
#83. Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#84. It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale.
Deb Caletti
#85. 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
#86. The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.
Robert Breault
#87. It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer
Arthur Schopenhauer
#88. There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.
Leo Tolstoy
#89. She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.
Jodi Picoult
#90. I believe that the only thing that will dispel the darkness is for the light to come on. And the lights are coming on. Here, there. People are eating more vegetables, living green, taking in and saving animals. All of that is the light coming on.
Iyanla Vanzant
#91. The conquest of the outskirts of the atmosphere, and eventually space, is a revolutionary event, comparable only to the transition of the aquatic animals to the land in geologic times.
Hubertus Strughold
#92. He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#93. He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.
Frances Wright
#94. Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.
Michel De Montaigne
#95. Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
Plautus
#96. 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
#97. Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.
John Carroll
#98. My most treasured possessions are not things; they are only things, my friends, family and animals are what counts.
John The Apostle
#99. Woe to humanity, should only a single animal have a seat in the Last Judgement.
Christian Morgenstern
#100. The underlying melody via every rock, plant, animal, sky and star, inside the water, from the dirt, through the light: only love lasts.
Melina Sempill Watts
