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Quotations about animals that are worth remembering

Discussion in 'Websites about Zoos & Animal Conservation' started by gentle lemur, 21 Jan 2019.

  1. birdsandbats

    birdsandbats Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    "If you look closely enough, a tortoise is as magnificent as a tiger."

    -Joel Sartore
     
  2. Onychorhynchus coronatus

    Onychorhynchus coronatus Well-Known Member

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    "I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason -- as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal."

    -Friedrich Nietzsche


    "Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?"

    - Friedrich Nietzsche


    "From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” God, in the dream, illumined the animal’s brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

    Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men."

    - Jorge Luis Borges

    "Thirty-five yards into the grass the big lion lay flattened out along the ground. His ears were back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his long, black-
    tufted tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this cover and he was sick with the wound through his fullbelly, and weakening with the wound through his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little opening the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as he breathed,
    and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush. He could hear the men talking and he waited, gathering all of himself into this preparation for a charge as soon as the men would come into the grass. As he heard their voices his tail stiffened to twitch up and down, and, as they came into the edge of the grass, he made a" coughing grunt and charged."

    -Ernest Hemmingway

    "It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices—the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sand flies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria.

    This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles."

    -Val Plumwood

    "No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist."

    - Ernest Hemmingway


    "If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world"

    - Albert Camus


    "The peregrine’s view of the land is like the yachtsman’s view of the shore as he sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the pierced horizon glides back on either side. Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand? Does he really ‘know’ that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel – as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white – that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon."

    - J.A.A Baker

    "It was their stillness that made me bow in fascination the first time I saw axolotls. Darkly it seemed to me to understand his secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. Later I learned better, the contraction of the gills, the feeling of the thin legs on the stones, the sudden swimming (some of them swim with the simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping from that mineral torpor in which they passed whole hours. Above everything, his eyes made me obsessed. Beside them in the other aquariums, various fish showed me the simple stupidity of their beautiful eyes similar to ours. The eyes of the axolotls told me of the presence of a different life, of another way of looking. Sticking my face to the glass (sometimes the guardian coughed uneasily) I tried to better see the tiny golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of the pink creatures. It was useless to tap a finger on the glass, there was no reaction in front of their faces. The golden eyes continued to burn with their sweet, terrible light; They kept looking at me from an unfathomable depth that made me dizzy."

    -Julio Cortazar

    "Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings."

    -Gerald Durrell


    "We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion, cutting down forests and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities — water — with industrial filth and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the Brown Rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition."

    -Gerald Durrell

    "In conservation, the motto should always be 'never say die'."

    -Gerald Durrell











     
    Last edited: 25 Sep 2020
    Birdsage and amur leopard like this.