Living Creatures Quotes - Page 6

Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.

Victor Hugo

Depressing, Struggle, Eye

Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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Obstacles can arise from good as well as bad circumstances, but they should never deter or overpower you. Be like the earth, which supports all living creatures indiscriminately, without distinguishing good from bad. The earth is simply there. Your practice should be strengthened by the difficult situations you encounter, just as a bonfire in a strong wind is not blown out, but blazes even brighter.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Strong, Wind, Practice

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It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.

Leo Tolstoy

Crush, Men, Animal

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To feel overflowing love and almost unbearable compassion for all living creatures is the best way to fulfil the wishes of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Even if for the moment you cannot actually help a sentient being in an external way, meditate on love and compassion constantly over the months and years until compassion is knit inseparably into the very fabric of your mind.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Compassion, Years, Mind

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To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse - that cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.

Richard Adams

Memories, Heart, Clouds

Richard Adams (2014). “Watership Down”, p.59, Oneworld Publications

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First, by the figurations of art there be made instruments of navigation without men to row them, as great ships to brooke the sea, only with one man to steer them, and they shall sail far more swiftly than if they were full of men; also chariots that shall move with unspeakable force without any living creature to stir them. Likewise an instrument may be made to fly withall if one sits in the midst of the instrument, and do turn an engine, by which the wings, being artificially composed, may beat the air after the manner of a flying bird.

Roger Bacon

Art, Moving, Men

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Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter.

Fritjof Capra

Essence, Shiva, Matter

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The law of love and compassion for all living creatures is again a doctrine to which we are all too ready to pay slip service. However, if it is to become a reality, it requires a process of education, a veritable mental renaissance. Once it has become a reality, national as well as international problems will fall into perspectives and become easier to solve. Wars and conflicts, too, will then become a thing of the past, because wars begin in the minds of men, and in those minds love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.

U Thant

War, Fall, Men

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Not only must a warrior be strong with his bow, but he must have a heart full of pity for all living creatures.

Eiji Yoshikawa

Strong, Heart, Warrior

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Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.

Richard Dawkins

Ignorance, Simple, Religion

"Should Religion Impact Your Vote?" by Roy Speckhardt, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 7, 2011.

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For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Loren Eiseley

Loneliness, Night, Years

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.125, Vintage

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"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."

John Ruskin

Lasts, Taste, Firsts

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The king governs without decapitation or (other) corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined, lightly or heavily, according to the circumstances (of each case). Even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off.

Faxian

Country, Kings, Cutting

"A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms".

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Only the brave should teach....Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.

Pearl S. Buck

Teaching, Artist, Brave

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No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.

Thomas More

Vanity, People, Want

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It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.

Cassiodorus

History, Doe, Impossible

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Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy.

Jack Kerouac

Meditation, Awakening, Realizing

Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.141, Penguin

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Certainly it was no design of the atoms to place themselves in a particular order, nor did they decide what motions each should have. But atoms were struck with blows in many ways and carried along by their own weight from infinite times up to the present. They have been accustomed to move and to meet in all manner of ways. For this reason, it came to pass that being spread abroad through a vast time and trying every sort of combination and motion, at length those come together that produce great things, like earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.

Lucretius

Moving, Blow, Infinite Time

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The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

Robert Graves

Simple, Emotional, Differences

Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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When I drink a Glass of water, it's thick and crawling with life. My mouth leads to the interior of my body - a caldron of disease, germs, and perversions of biology. I don't exist individually. I'm made of millions of living creatures, eating each other, decomposing, eating each other.

Michael Gira

Glasses, Water, Mouths

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[Clover] secretly hitched a ride with a nice German couple and their new baby...Clover appeared to the baby, so as to be a delightful, soothing surprise. Well, the child did like Clover. In fact, she held him and cooed. When the parents turned around to look at her and saw their child holding a furry, living creature, they needlessly panicked.

Obert Skye

Baby, Children, Couple

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The law, moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind.

Josephus

Children, Law, Abortion

Flavius Josephus (2015). “Writings of Josephus: Book 2”, p.283, Lulu.com

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Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

Thomas Huxley

Different, Form, Existence

Thomas H. Huxley (2013). “Man's Place in Nature”, p.74, Courier Corporation

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But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.

Lawrence Anthony

Inspirational, Motivational, Wall

Anthony Lawrence, Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence (2009). “The Elephant Whisperer: Learning About Life, Loyalty and Freedom From a Remarkable Herd of Elephants”, p.365, Pan Macmillan

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What call thou solitude? Is not the earth with various living creatures, and the air replenished, and all these at thy command to come and play before thee?

John Milton

Air, Play, Solitude

John Milton (1871). “The poetical works of John Milton, ed. with a critical memoir by W.M. Rossetti”, p.128

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