Creatures Quotes - Page 24

• The creatures that want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless, we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well brought up shoot them for fun.

  Clarence Day

  Fun, Hunting, Want

  Clarence Day, Jr. (2004). “This Simian World”, p.28, 1st World Publishing

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• Man is the hunter; women are the game; those sleek and shining creatures of the chase. We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; they love us for it, and we ride them down.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Men, Hunting, Games

  'The Princess' (1847) pt. 5, l. 147

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• We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures.

  Dalai Lama

  Nature, Travel, Environmental

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• I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Science, Thinking

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• I have a kitten,the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin.

  William Cowper

  Cat, Skins, Kitten

  William Cowper (1835). “The Works of William Cowper: With a Life and Notes”, p.185

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• His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

  William S. Burroughs

  Wall, Sadness, Cat

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• Neither love me for
  Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,
  A creature might forget to weep, who bore
  Thy comfort long, and lose thy love, thereby!
  But love me for love's sake, that evermore
  Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Famous Love, Long, Comfort

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1872). “Poetical Works”, p.144

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• Have charity towards all beings. Pity those who are in distress. Love all creatures. Do not be jealous of anyone. Look not to the faults of others.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Jealous, Looks, Charity

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2376, Manonmani Publishers

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• Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward people, but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Life, Thinking, Compassion

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• For our soul is so preciously loved of him that is highest, that it over-passeth the knowing of all creatures.

  Julian of Norwich

  Knowing, Soul, Highest

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• Weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream.

  Aristophanes

  Dream, Race, Darkness

  Aristophanes (2012). “The Birds”, p.21, Courier Corporation

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• Oall the creatures that creep and breathe on earth, there is none more wretched than man.

  Homer

  Men, Earth, Breathe

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• Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate.

  Alexander Pope

  Book, Fate, Heaven

  Alexander Pope (1820). “An Essay on Man: In Four Epistles to H. St. John Lord Bolinbroke. To which are Added the Universal Prayer, Messiah, and Elegy”, p.7

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• Christ chiefly manifests Himself in times of affliction, because then the soul unites itself most closely by faith to Christ. The soul, in time of prosperity, scatters its affections, and looses itself in the creature; but there is a uniting power in sanctified afflictions, by which a believer, (as in rain a hen collects her brood) gathers his best affections unto his Father and his God.

  Richard Sibbes

  Father, Rain, Grace

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• It is the great support and solace of the saints in all the distresses that befall them here, that there is a wise Spirit sitting in all the wheels of motion, and governing the most eccentric creatures and their most pernicious designs to blessed and happy issues.

  John Flavel

  Wise, Religious, Blessed

  John Flavel (2013). “The Mystery of Providence”, p.4, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Talking

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Know thyself! This is the source of all wisdom, said the great thinkers of the past, and the sentence was written in golden letters on the temple of the gods. To know himself, Linnæus declared to be the essential indisputable distinction of man above all other creatures. I know, indeed, in study nothing more worthy of free and thoughtful man than the study of himself. For if we look for the purpose of our existence, we cannot possibly find it outside ourselves. We are here for our own sake.

  Karl Ernst von Baer

  Science, Thoughtful, Past

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• Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

  Martin Rees

  Science, Thinking, Years

  "The Catastrophist" by Christopher Hitchens, www.theatlantic.com. January 2010.

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• The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Distance, Moving, Science

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• The eternal spring is hidden in this living bread for our life's sake, although it is night. It is here calling out to creatures; and they satisfy their thirst, although in darkness, because it is night. This living spring that I long for, I see in this bread of life, although it is night.

  John of the Cross

  Spring, Night, Bread Of Life

  Saint John of the Cross, Kieran Kavanaugh (1991). “The collected works of Saint John of the Cross”, I C S Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies

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• Man, being made reasonable, and so a thinking creature, there is nothing more worthy of his being than the right direction and employment of his thoughts; since upon this depends both his usefulness to the public, and his own present and future benefit in all respects.

  William Penn

  Men, Thinking, Benefits

  Benjamin Franklin, William Penn (2012). “Franklin's Way to Wealth and Penn's Maxims”, p.74, Courier Corporation

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• To me, cruelty is the worst of human sins. Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty, whether it be human or animal.

  Jane Goodall

  Pain, Science, Animal

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• Being a parent is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy

  Barbara Walters

  Dog, Love You, Parent

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• We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

  William Hazlitt

  Life, Fall, Passion

  William Hazlitt (1904). “The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Fugitive writings”

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• The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

  Rollo May

  Heart, Views, Sunrise

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.10, W. W. Norton & Company

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