Top 100 The Only Animal Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Humans are the only animals that draw ... Practically every human being draws at some time in childhood.
Peter Steinhart
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. '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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Man is the only animal who blushes...or needs to.
Mark Twain
#18. If you're going to kill the animal it seems only polite to use the whole thing.
Fergus Henderson
#19. 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
#20. Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.
Robert Breault
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
Plautus
#34. 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
#35. Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.
John Carroll
#36. My most treasured possessions are not things; they are only things, my friends, family and animals are what counts.
John The Apostle
#37. Woe to humanity, should only a single animal have a seat in the Last Judgement.
Christian Morgenstern
#38. 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
#39. Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.
Richard Wagner
#40. Marriage is the only game where the trapped animal has to buy the license.
Dan Poynter
#41. Revenge is the thinking man's reflex, a complex blend of action and consistency no other animal species has so far succeeded in evolving. Evolutionary speaking, the practice of taking revenge has shown itself to the so effective that only the most vengeful of us have survived.
Jo Nesbo
#42. Starvation does not occur because of a world food shortage. If everyone ate a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet there would be enough food for everyone. The only sane way forward is to grow food for humans rather than to feed it to farmed animals..
Jeremy Rifkin
#43. 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
#44. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir!
Charles Dickens
#45. Because the brain models our sense of self as just another instance of a thing, it is easy for us to project qualities that we only know of from our own minds into other objects. This allows us to imagine intelligence in a rock, a tree, an animal or even a politician.
Sean Hastings
#47. The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal.
Compton Mackenzie
#48. Humans are the only animals that try to dwell in the future. You don't have to purely live in the present situation without a plan, but the future plans you make can only be based on the aspects of the future that manifest within the present situation.
Chogyam Trungpa
#49. A "divine people" lives in a world in which it is the born persecutor of all other weaker species, or the born victim of all other stronger species. Only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its political destinies.
Hannah Arendt
#50. If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
J.M. Coetzee
#51. For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.
David Zindell
#52. The horse is the only animal into which one can bang nails.
Jules Renard
#53. A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
Ogden Nash
#54. When you're seventeen and the only friend you have in town is a stuffed animal that doesn't even belong to you, I think it's safe to say your life is officially in the shitter.
Eileen Cook
#55. Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
Colin Wilson
#56. Deerstalking would be a very fine sport if only the deer had guns.
W.S. Gilbert
#57. The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.
Joel Fuhrman
#58. If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justifiable solution.
Jerry Vlasak
#59. If a dog doesn't put you first where are you both? In what relation? A dog needs God. It lives by your glances, your wishes. It even shares your humor. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal.
Enid Bagnold
#60. I wish I could do it again, only I wish I could take all of the animals out of the environmental fur farm ... I have absolutely no regrets, and I hope the same thing continues to happen at MSU and every other college campus that does animal research.
Rod Coronado
#61. Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.
Colin McGinn
#63. The only thing rational about man, the rational animal, is his ability to rationalize his own present position.
Allen MacDiarmid
#64. You are all right. But you are all wrong too. For each of you touched only one part of the animal.
Karen Backstein
#65. Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#66. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Milan Kundera
#67. But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.
Asa Gray
#68. The only thing you find in the middle of the road are dead animals and dumb Americans.
Anton Newcombe
#69. Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.
Rudolf Arnheim
#70. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing a man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is.
G.K. Chesterton
#71. Darwin speculated that "music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph" and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.
Oliver Sacks
#72. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
Henry David Thoreau
#73. 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
#74. The animal has its happiness in the senses, the human beings in their intellect, and the gods in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful.
Swami Vivekananda
#75. What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilisation concerns man's behaviour to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.
Edward Mayhew
#76. 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
#77. That's a divorce. You ever seen a divorce? That's like her taking not only the furniture and the silverware
she took the dog, too. (Harvick) didn't get the animal, I would say.
Clint Bowyer
#78. Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.
Mark Twain
#79. Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
#80. Man is the only animal that can be bored.
Erich Fromm
#81. So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act.
Edward Thorndike
#82. The Indians the needed some food, and some skins for a roof. They only took what they needed, baby, millions of buffalo were the proof.
Ted Nugent
#83. What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven't done.
Tom Hurndall
#84. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
O. Henry
#85. One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal - to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live.
Max Beckmann
#86. I live in New York, and the only live animals you see are cockroaches, rats and pigeons, which I admire immensely. When I see an animal that thrives in the garbage, I feel relief; in our urban environment, other animals are dying out.
Isabella Rossellini
#87. 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
#88. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Graham Greene
#89. The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and the most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave.
Rosa Bonheur
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Much of the early work focused on dopamine and we were really looking for rewarding sorts of effects and sure enough, we only found that. But you can destroy the main dopamine-producing structures of the brain and you can still get an animal to self-administer drugs like cocaine.
Carl Hart
#93. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C.S. Lewis
#94. This is the animal Brad, my favorite side of him, a side I only see in these moments, when he is watching me with another, and every alpha male instinct is on high alert.
Alessandra Torre
#95. Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.
Mark Twain
#96. In that moment I was deeply grateful to the Gypsies, and for the simplemindedness of the animal part of my brain; that a hot meal and a song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while. Then
Ransom Riggs
#97. In every man, there were two beings: one the spiritual, seeking only that kind of happiness for him self which should tend towards the happiness of all; the other, the animal man, seeking only his own happiness, and ready to sacrifice to it the happiness of the rest of the world.
Leo Tolstoy
#98. I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only "want" toys or food the way a plant "wants" the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot
Sy Montgomery
#99. we all have a purpose, be it person or animal or the bark of a tree. What our purpose is, we only find out when we are ready. You are almost there, my child. Accept who and what you are, and happiness will follow you forever.
Trish Marie Dawson
#100. The only argument against vivisection that will be seen to have lasting power - that we do not improve human society by means that debase human character.
Jon Wynne-Tyson
