Quotes & Sayings About Animal Compassion

Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil. — Colin McGinn

People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences. — Paul Bloom

What you have to say matters! Post anything about why you chose veganism using the hastag #2Bvegan4 (to be vegan for). — Martin Blais

Sex is animal, love is human, compassion is divine. Sex is physical, love is psychological, compassion is spiritual. — Osho

We are beginning to learn that each animal has a life and a place and a role in this world. If we place compassion and care in the middle of all our dealings with the animal world and honor and respect their lives, our attitudes will change. — Jane Goodall

If you eat animals, you don't love animals; you love to eat them." - Andrew Kirschner, Ed.D. — Andrew Kirschner

Encompass with your mercy and compassion all animals and creatures. Do not say, "this is inanimate and has no awareness." Indeed, it does; it is you yourself who have no awareness! So let existence be as it is, and be merciful towards it with the mercifulness of the Creator in the midst of His creation. — Ibn Ata Allah

In my own field, I know that solid science can easily be done with ethics and compassion. There's nothing wrong with compassionate or sentimental science or scientists. Studies of animal thought, emotions, and self-awareness, as well as behavioral ecology and conservation biology, can all be compassionate as well as scientifically rigorous. Science and the ethical treatment of animals aren't incompatible. We can do solid science with an open mind and a big heart.
I encourage everyone to go where their hearts take them, with love, not fear. If we all travel this road, the world will be a better place for all beings. Kinder and more humane choices will be made when we let our hearts lead the way. Compassion begets compassion and caring for and loving animals spills over into compassion and caring for humans. The umbrella of compassion is very important to share freely and widely. — Marc Bekoff

I'm not an activist; I don't look for controversy. I'm not a political person, but I'm a person with compassion. I care passionately about equal rights. I care about human rights. I care about animal rights. — Ellen DeGeneres

Animal rights, at its heart, is the most unextreme philosophy I can imagine. It is about nonviolence. It is about compassion. It is about not harming and not causing suffering and not killing when we don't have to — Stephanie Ernst

The phrase "animal rights" has been, and still is, employed most often to describe moral rights and social values in favor of compassion and against cruelty. The modern twist is the emergence of conversations where the term means all of this and more, namely, the possibility of legal rights for some or all nonhuman animals. — Paul Waldau

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends - the fear, the terror, the pain - and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being. — Rai Aren

Animals cannot speak, but can you and I not speak for them and represent them? Let us all feel their silent cry of agony and let us all help that cry to be heard in the world. — Rukmini Devi Arundale

Animals, they are one of the most beautiful gifts we have and, you know, if there are people that have compassion, there are very few people that put their money into animal rescue organizations. And if there is someone that has that passion, animals need all the help they can get. — Alyssa Milano

Through the art of personal development, we see an opportunity for these animals to inspire compassion, essentially creating a path to deep personal growth. This program [Animal sanctuary] will deploy ISF's youth development program, U Factor. The program helps youth identify their passion, cultivate their talent, amplify their purpose, and connect the younger generation to diminishing species and biodiversity. — Ian Somerhalder

All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion. — Rita Mae Brown

Let a man fear, above all, me, his God, and so much the gentler will he become toward my creatures and animals, on whom, on account of me, their Creator, he ought to have compassion. — Bridget Of Sweden

Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. How can people live like they do? I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought. — Karen Russell

Embrace compassion without exception. — Janice Anderson

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. — J.M. Coetzee

Compassion begets compassion, cruelty begets cruelty. What we give we will ultimately receive. Nonhumans help make us human. They teach us respect, compassion, and unconditional love. When we mistreat animals, we mistreat ourselves. When we destroy animal spirits and souls, we destroy our own spirits and souls. — Marc Bekoff

Scientists are supposed to study animals in a totally objective fashion, similar to the way we inspect a rock or measure the circumference of a tree trunk. Emotions are not to interfere with the assessment. The animal-rights movement capitalizes on this perception, depicting scientists as devoid of compassion. — Frans De Waal

Have compassion towards each other, including animals. — Matt Sorum

Every part of the system of Reiki is ultimately about meditation and compassion as keys to healing. — Kathleen Prasad

Ultimately the case for shunning animal flesh does not rest on what the Buddha allegedly said or didn't say. What is does rest on is our innate moral goodness, compassion, and pity which, when liberated, lead us to value all forms of life. It is obvious, then, that willfully to take life, or through the eating of meat indirectly to cause others to kill, runs counter to the deepest instincts of human beings. — Philip Kapleau

Animals and humans come in many different sizes and colors, but we all have the same loving heart and soul. — Anthony D. Williams

As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love, and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness. — Richard Gere

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks. — Peter Singer

But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman - you are as an animal - 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus. — Truman Capote

In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can
forgetting to ask whether we should. — Wayne Pacelle

Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us ... — Rai Aren

If humans are kind to each other, if really humanity do exist, the world would have been a better place and we wouldn't need to fight so much for innocent lives. This would have made our struggles easier. As I get involved more and more in protecting innocent lives my faith in Humanity fades away. What a world we live in? Can we have faith in humanity? We humans are here to protect others, but we are the very reason that their lives are in danger. How long can we fight for the week, for the voiceless? The future is so dark!!! — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life, - produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy, - recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion? — Voltaire

Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Surely it should be a matter of moral responsibility that we humans, different from other animals mainly by virtue of our more highly developed intellect and, with it, our greater capacity for understanding and compassion, ensure that medical progress slowly detaches its roots from the manure of non-human animal suffering and despair. — Jane Goodall

Compassion for animals is something that every child has naturally but they are lured away from these instincts by society's nasty habits. — Dan Mathews

Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain. — Robert Winston

He who abstains from anything animate ... will be much more careful not to injure those of his own species. For he who loves the genus will not hate any species of animals. — Porphyry

If you eat chicken, maybe you're on one level. If you wear a mink coat, maybe you're on another level. But if you wear cosmetics, cosmetics that are tested on animals, then you're just unconscious. Really, my message is simple. It's a message of compassion. In this world that is spinning madly out of control, we have to realize that we're all related. We have to try to live harmoniously. — Woody Harrelson

Sadly, we live in a world where if you do good things, there are no financial rewards. If you poison the earth, there is a fortune to be made. — June Stoyer

The difference between the level of man's mind and that of the animal's equals to the Potential Energy; and the difference between the level of man's clemency and that of the animal's equals to the Kinetic Energy. Intellectuality is therefore a measure of Potential Energy, while Compassion is a measure of Kinetic Energy. After all, it is the heart which does the pumping and the synapse (aka, neuronal junction) which controls the transmission of the signals. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

If we wish for mercy ourselves, we must show mercy to all dumb animals. — Joyce Lambert

I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. — William O. Douglas

I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals. — Brigid Brophy

Babies have the power to make grumpy people happy because they love you no matter what. Dogs are that way, too. — Mariel Hemingway

People say what distinguishes us from the animals is that we think. Well, then why the hell don't we extend some compassion to those under tremendous duress? There's this whole idea that you work really hard so you can deaden your soul to the universe and enjoy yourself only in ways the Sierra Club will let you. But what about enjoying yourself by getting into the whole melee of poverty and racism and violence and murder and drug addiction? Get in there, roll up your sleeves, and do something! Nobody does it. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

There are so many causes. Gun control, climate change, deforestation, animal welfare, human welfare, education. Working on the big issues is noble and great, but being aware of what's going on around you right at this moment, being kind to the people around you, extending compassion and decency, not just to everyone you meet but also to yourself - I think that's one of the biggest challenges most people face. — Moby

in the past fifty years people in many Western societies have come to feel compassion in response to many more kinds of animal suffering, and they've come to feel disgust in response to many fewer kinds of sexual activity. The current triggers can change in a single generation, even though it would take many generations for genetic evolution to alter the design of the module and its original triggers. — Anonymous

Each and every animal on earth has as much right to be here as you and me — Anthony D. Williams

Farmed animals are not future Buddhas donating their flesh out of compassion for those of us who have developed a craving for it. They are victims of our greed from whom we steal the most precious gift any of us has: life. — Norm Phelps

Humanity is not only 'great acts' spending thousands, putting your name on headlines. Humanity is to be kind to every living being, to be compassionate towards all, even to the tiniest animal, seen and unseen. Some people consider killing ants or pest normal, but I find it is an act of extreme cruelty. By killing them you violate their rights to live. We must remember that the earth and the universe belongs to all of us. We are just another species out of millions of species, and we share the universe with them and most importantly, remember that we belong to each other. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

It's in the nature of the humans and the entire animal kingdom to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. But what makes us true humans is the power to not hit back. — Abhijit Naskar

Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure? — Gary Yourofsky

No nation is truly free until the animal, man's younger brother is free and happy. — Sadhu T. L. Vaswani

There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.' — Friedrich Nietzsche

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life. — Nhat Hanh

You can't go into the ring and be a nice guy. I would go a month, two months, without having sex. It worked for me because it made me a vicious animal. You can't fight if you have any compassion or anything like that. — Jake LaMotta

There are many people out there (me being one of them) who can vouch that animals have feelings; they feel compassion and love, as well as pain! — Jane Goodall

When we hunt or fish, we deliberately kill a defenseless being who wishes us no harm. This is a direct violation of the First Precept. It is absolutely forbidden to Buddhists. As to eating meat, we know that the only way we can obtain it is for an animal to be killed. Therefore, when we eat meat, it is our intent that an innocent animal should die to satisfy our addiction to flesh. And that underlying intention, no matter how well hidden behind a smokescreen of rationalizations will block the growth of compassion and create negative karma. — Norm Phelps

'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings and this commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. — Leo Tolstoy

Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots. — Sally Jo Martine

See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left - no, nor despair -
To break his teeth on the bars. — Cecil Day-Lewis

We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace. — Albert Schweitzer

I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans. — Sophia Loren

For arousing compassion, the nineteenth-century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggested imagining beings in torment - an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommended imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching as a raging river sweeps her child away. To contact the suffering of another being fully and directly is as painful as being in the woman's shoes. — Pema Chodron

This compassion, or sympathy with the pains of others, ought also to extend to the brute creation, as far as our necessities will admit; for we cannot exist long without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings either in their mature or embryon state. Such is the condition of mortality, that the first law of nature is 'eat, or be eaten.' Hence for the preservation of our existence we may be supposed to have a natural right to kill those brute creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us; but to destroy even insects wantonly shows an unreflecting mind, or a depraved heart. — Erasmus Darwin

You cannot have two foundations. Either you stand and act from your heart and soul, or your life will flow from the animal soul, the nafs, your lust and greed and forgetfulness, which are characteristics of what dies and does not surrender to receive the compassion of God. — Bahauddin

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion. — Alan W. Watts

Because animals seem to dwell in the present moment,
because their own presence is so instinctive,
their attention so unwavering, the offer us
a different kind of compassion than humans do.
Anyone is lucky to have both human and
animal comfort in their lives. — Brenda Peterson

Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food — Philip Kapleau

Toothaches afflict those who have no compassion for animals. — Nachman Of Breslov

You are a human being with a free will. Which puts you above the animal level. But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman - you are as an animal - "an — Truman Capote

...rewilding is all about being nice, kind, compassionate, empathic, and harnessing our inborn goodness and optimism. We must all work together at this. It's about time we focus on the good side of human and animal nature. ... nature offers many lessons for kinder society. Blood shouldn't sell. — Marc Bekoff

Animals are not property or "things" but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support. — Marc Bekoff

Compassion is the basis of all truthful relationship: it means being present with love-for ourselves and for all life, including animals, fish, birds, and trees. Compassion is bringing our deepest truth into our actions, no matter how much the world seems to resist, because that is ultimately what we have to give this world and one another. — Ram Dass

Being vegan or vegetarian isn't just about compassion for animals. Most of the destruction of the planet is the result of all the clear-cutting, groundwater contamination, grain production, fuel consumption, greenhouse gas, viral proliferation - the direct result of livestock production. — William McNamara

But those who are incapable of
pitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.
A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces
laying bare
the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out with
forceps
would not hesitate to try experiments with men and women
for the gratification of his curiosity. — Robert G. Ingersoll

We need a boundless ethic, one which will include the animals, too. Until we extend the circle of his compassions to all living things, we will not find peace. — Albert Schweitzer

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For?, 1989 Jesus pioneered a relationship ethic based on compassion. Being a disciple means building relationships - with the Creator and with all creation and creatures. — Leonard Sweet

As human beings we each have a responsibility to care for humanity. Expressing concern for others brings inner strength and deep satisfaction. As social animals, human beings need friendship, but friendship doesn't come from wealth and power, but from showing compassion and concern for others. — Dalai Lama

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion toward our fellow creatures. — Mahatma Gandhi

People said things to me like "They're just animals. They're here for our use." I had a visceral reaction to that phrase, maybe because I was told countless times during my growing-up years that I was "just like an animal." I had suffered much of my life because I was considered less than human. Animals were suffering because they were less than human. And it seemed to me that human didn't have much to be proud of, if they treated other living things with such blind cruelty. — Elizabeth Kim

Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed. — Charles Darwin

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality? — Germaine Greer

There is no question that Francis was in advance of his age, as he anticipated all that is liberal and sympathetic in modern times: the love of nature, the love of animals, the sense of social compassion, the sense of the spiritual dangers of affluence. — Henryk Skolimowski

Graciousness, courtesy, compassion-this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on. — Richard J. Foster

When virtuous mental attitudes, like mindfulness, respect, and compassion, are invoked to justify nonvirtuous acts like hunting, fishing, and eating animal products, the mental attitudes are insincere. They are self-deceptions that we create to justify habits that in our hearts we know are wrong, but to which we have become attached. — Norm Phelps

There are many animal-welfare groups that sometimes seem to forget that human beings are animals too, that we need to include them in our sphere of compassion. — Jane Goodall

Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual's pain, suffering, and anxiety matter. — Marc Bekoff

Earl: Augh! They're trying to take the wolf off the endangered list .
Mooch: I know. But did you hear what they're putting back on the endangered list?
Earl: What?
Mooch: Empathy and compassion. — Patrick McDonnell

A man, who can, in cold blood, hunt and torture a poor, innocent animal, cannot feel much compassion for the distress of his own species. — Frederick The Great

How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers? — Joseph Wood Krutch

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable. — Thomas More

Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. — Cesar Chavez

Survival is for the human animal; fear the motivation. For the spiritual being survival is irrelevant. Curiosity, compassion and creativity are the name of the game; unconditional love the motivation. — Peter Shepherd

We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity. — Jane Goodall

An animal in pain is the saddest thing on Earth. — Sanober Khan

Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts. — Marc Bekoff

Life is as precious to us as it is for an animal. An animal is as loving, caring, and kind to her children as we are. She might not be able to tell us but she can express it through her eyes and expressions. She feels joy and happiness. She is helpless in our cruel hands and vulnerable to our vicious greed. Let us be kind to animals. Let us learn to feel their pain. Can we kill a helpless baby to feed our greed? Then how can we kill helpless animal friends that can't talk? Often we kill just for fun. How funny would it be if an animal killed a human just for fun? Let us be kind to animals as much as possible. I know we can. It is easier to love an animal than a human being. If you love an animal, it will rarely hurt you. Let us practice kindness and compassion to animals so that we may create a peaceful world. — Debasish Mridha