Quotes About Animals and
Why They're Important to Us

These 36 quotes about animals give us a good picture of why we need them in our lives, and why we should do everything we can to protect them.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

Martin Buber

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.

Jean Cocteau

Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing—not unlike friends and wives.

Gerald Durrell

Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Albert Einstein

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

George Eliot

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.

Nora Ephron

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

Anatole France

The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.

Michael Friedman

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Mohandas Gandhi

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

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.

Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of Pooh

Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I don't believe in the concept of hell, but if I did I would think of it as filled with people who were cruel to animals.

Gary Larson

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.

Abraham Lincoln

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.

Ashley Montagu

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.

Alfred A. Montapert

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.

John Muir

With an endless assortment of children and animals living under one roof, there was always some absurd crisis that gave comic relief to my problems.

Sally Jessy Raphael

I know at last what distinguishes man from animals: financial worries.

Romain Roland

The little furry buggers are just deep, deep wells you throw all your emotions into.

Bruce Schimmel

It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked.

Haile Selassie

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.

William Shakespeare

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That's the essence of inhumanity.

George Bernard Shaw

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

St. Francis of Assisi

I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be. But I think there's another thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vacuum cleaners.

Jeff Stilson

Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.

Albert Payson Terhune

I have consolidated all Mark Twain dog quotes together on one page.

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.

Unknown Author

The zoo is a place for animals to study the behaviour of human beings.

Unknown Author

Animals have these advantages over man: They have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Voltaire

The Animals of the planet are in desperate peril. Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

Alice Walker

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

Alice Walker

The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.

Thornton Wilder

The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.

Edward O. Wilson

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

Émile Zola