Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Quotes & Sayings

The curiosity of cats is, like their affection, of a purity and intensity rarely seen in humans. We would be jaded when faced with the fiftieth paper bag. Not so our cats. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

We might miss the sign or we may be unable to read the expression, but it is almost a contradiction in terms to say that a dog feels something but does not show it. What a dog feels, a dog shows, and, conversely, what a dog shows, a dog actually does feel. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Strange as it seems, we appear to be the only species who do not have an instinctive ability to know what food we should eat to stay healthy. All other animals do. We consider ourselves a superior species, yet we are destroying the only planet we have, endangering our very existence. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

After a lifetime of affectionate regard for dogs and many years of close observation and reflection, I have reached the conclusion that dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Hardly any animal can look as deeply disappointed as a dog to whom one says "no." — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Love for a dog during childhood is one of the deepest and purest emotions we are ever likely to have, and it remains with us for the rest of our lives. For some people, their first experience with love is with a dog. The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely, so openly, so unambivalently, is for many children a unique and lasting experience. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Every time I told my cocker spaniel, Taffy, my very first dog, that we were going for a walk, she would launch into a celebratory dance that ended with her racing around the room, always clockwise, and faster and faster, as if her joy could not be possibly contained. Even as a young boy I knew that hardly any creature could express joy so vividly as a dog. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Farmers today keep themselves in ignorance of the needs and true nature of pigs precisely because to know would put their conscience in a terrible bind. Wilful ignorance of this kind is no better than complicity. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Questers of the truth, that's who dogs are; seekers after the invisible scent of another being's authentic core. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Dogs never lie about love. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Then in a great crash they threw themselves to the floor, ears flopped down, the whites of their eyes showing, looking the way only a dog can look who is totally disappointed. Indeed, they were the very pictures of disappointment. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Animals love and suffer, cry and laugh; their hearts rise up in anticipation and fall in despair ... they feel. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

We need cats to need us. It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

(about cats) They also resist our calls to come, to move, to obey, to present themselves, to do all the things that dogs do so easily. This drives some people crazy. Cats do not even care what drives us crazy! — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

A lion is not a lion if it is only free to eat, to sleep and to copulate. It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory; and to die where it was born - in the wild. It should have the same rights as we have. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Us" versus "them" is not in our genes. It is something we learn. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

It is rarely possible, when a human being is in deep need, to look upon somebody who offers help as merely another flawed human being with whom one is going to engage in a protracted conversation. A kind of wild idealization sets in, and we imagine the person in whom we confide to possess ineffable and valuable traits beyond those attainable by ordinary mortals. We ascribe value, and project qualities onto this person that almost never correspond with reality. It is a little bit like falling in love - powerful emotions are called forth. It takes a strong person not to exploit the ensuing power imbalance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

When we do it, it is for art. When they [animals] do it, it is for competition. Both may be true. What is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior in spiritual terms of a sense of beauty, and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating fitness. The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher and unique. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Many people have heard the remarkable example of devotion involving a Skye terrier dog who worked for a Scottish shepherd named Old Jock. In 1858, the day after Jock was buried (with almost nobody present to mourn him except his shaggy dog) in the churchyard at Greyfriars Abbey in Edinburgh, Bobby was found sleeping on his master's grave, where he continued to sleep every night for fourteen years. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

The standards for defining the existence of emotions in animals begin with those in common use for humans. One should demand no more proof that an animal feels an emotion than would be demanded of a human - and, like humans, the animal should be permitted to speak its own emotional language, which it is up to the beholder to understand. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Swimming the ocean a giant brain watches us. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believes that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all? — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson