Human Animal Nature Quotes & Sayings

A wealth of knowledge is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals, knowing that much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. Animals are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen. — Suzy Kassem

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. — Guy De Maupassant

The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into a graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the shallows with diffident elegance in the falling light, not feeding but only staring off toward the ocean. They seemed a kind of animal I had never quite seen before. — Barry Lopez

The Golden Number is a mathematical definition of a proportional function which all of nature obeys, whether it be a mollusk shell, the leaves of plants, the proportions of the animal body, the human skeleton, or the ages of growth in man. — R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one. — Jodi Picoult

I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is
over and over again
the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after. — Sara Maitland

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. — Aristotle.

After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stuport, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can't be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all? — Frans De Waal

We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others - both human and animal. — Gregory Colbert

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research. — Elizabeth Blackwell

Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To our way of thinking the Indians' symbol is the circle, the hoop. Nature wants to be round. The bodies of human beings and animals have no corners. With us, the circle stands for togetherness of people who sit with one another around the campfire, relatives and friends united in peace while the sacred pipe passes from hand to hand. To us this is beautiful and fitting, symbol and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature. — John Fire Lame Deer

Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it. — Guy De Maupassant

I once believed man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not. — Kang Chol-Hwan

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? — Emma Goldman

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. — George Santayana

They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.' [ ... ] To be a perfect animal and a perfect human - that was the ideal. — Aldous Huxley

Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal. — Mahatma Gandhi

If the basic human nature was aggressive, we would have been born with animal claws & huge teeth
but ours are very short, very pretty, very weak! That means we are not well equipped to be aggressive beings. Even the size of our mouth is very small. So I think the basic nature of human beings should be gentle. — Dalai Lama

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he exposed the world to a momentous discovery . For the first time in history, human beings were seen not as creatures of divine origin, but instead, as a product of nature, an animal like every other on the planet. Imagine yourself back in that amazing year. The day before Darwin's book was published, you wake up thinking yourself the image of God; the next morning you realize you have the face of a monkey. Not everybody immediately embraced this rude demotion from god to goat. — Jeff Schweitzer

The ruling British elite are like animals
not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings. — Lyndon LaRouche

Nature knows nothing of imperfection; imperfection is a human perception of nature. Inasmuch as we are part of nature we are also perfect; it is our humanity that is imperfect. And, ironically, because of our capacity for imperfection and error we are free beings - a freedom that no stone or animal can enjoy. Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless. The God that plays dice has set us free. — Heinz R. Pagels

I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object ... I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. — Isaiah Berlin

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison. — J.B. Priestley

Every living thing, animal or human, or tree experiences that which is called death, with no exception. You've all accepted that one a long time ago. Spirit, which is who we really are, or Source, is eternal. So what death must be is a changing of the perspective of that Eternal Spirit. If I am standing in my physical body and am consciously connected to that Eternal Spirit, then I'm Eternal in nature and I need not ever again fear any endedness, because, from that perspective I understand that there is not any of that. — Esther Hicks

Man's threefold lower nature - consisting of his physical organism, his emotional nature, and his mental faculties - reflects the light of his threefold Divinity and bears witness of It in the physical world. Man's three bodies are symbolized by an upright triangle; his threefold spiritual nature by an inverted triangle. These two triangles, when united in the form of a six-pointed star, were called by the Jews "the Star of David," "the Signet of Solomon," and are more commonly known today as "the Star of Zion." These triangles symbolize the spiritual and material universes linked together in the constitution of the human creature, who partakes of both Nature and Divinity. Man's animal nature partakes of the earth; his divine nature of the heavens; his human nature of the mediator. — Manly P. Hall

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community. — Jacques Maritain

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most ... No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice ... but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different ... Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips". — Annie Dillard

All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature. — Paul Gauguin

You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

I always believed in animal spirits. It's not their existence that is new. It's the fact that they are not random events, but actually replicate in-bred qualities of human nature which create those animal spirits. — Alan Greenspan

Beyond this world is another world for us. This world and its delights cater to the animal within us. These pleasures all fill our animal nature, while our real self slowly dies. They say, "The human being is a rational animal," yet we consist of two things. Lusts and desires feed our animality in this material world. But as for our true essence, its food is knowledge, wisdom, and the sight of God. The animality within us flees away from God, while our spiritual self flees away from this world. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Non-violence is more powerful than violence. Nature eliminates violent animals bit by bit. — Amit Ray

The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life. — George Perkins Marsh

It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all. — Stevie Smith

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called 'animal,' so-called 'instincts,' and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in 'nature.' Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being's very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as 'animal' as his cruelty. — Gregory Bateson

And in that hour,
The seeds of cruelty, that since have swell'd
To such gigantic and enormous growth,
Were sown in human nature's fruitful soil.
Hence date the persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,
Regardless of their plaints. — William Cowper

I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating. — Linus Pauling

With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them. — Peter Singer

Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now. — Lord Chesterfield

No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal. — Joni Mitchell

No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind, than the study of Nature and natural objects; and whether we labour to investigate the structure and function of the human system, whether we direct our attention to the classification and habits of the animal kingdom, or prosecute our researches in the more pleasing and varied field of vegetable life, we shall constantly find some new object to attract our attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of gratification and delight. — Joseph Paxton

We do take pleasure in one thing that you probably won't be able to guess. Namely, making friends with nature ... nature is always there at hand to wrap us up, gently: glowing, swaying, bubbling, rustling.
Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I'm being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get the sensation that my body's now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself. This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I'm a human being, and one with special needs to boot.
Nature calms me down when I'm furious, and laughs with me when I'm happy. You might think that it's not possible that nature could be a friend, not really. But human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, and perhaps us people with autism still have some left-over awareness of this, buried somewhere deep down. I'll always cherish that part of me that thinks of nature as a friend. — Naoki Higashida

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. — Gavin Maxwell

When I look at birds and animals, their survival is without rules, without conditions, without organization. But mothers take good care of their offspring. That's nature. In human beings also, parents - particularly mothers - and children have a special bond. Mother's milk is a sign of this affection. We are created that way. The child's survival is entirely dependent on someone else's affection. So, basically, each individual's survival or future depends on society. We need these human values. — Dalai Lama

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born. — Longinus

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart ... To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty ... and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted.
[For the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789] — Benjamin Franklin

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats. — J.M. Coetzee

There is a historic strain of dominion theology which says, taking its references from the Psalms, that man is made just a little lower than God, and that we are the crown of creation. That interpretation has come at the expense of the one that says when God, in the story of Noah, intervened to save human life against the flood, against the acts of nature, He did not stop with human beings. He made sure that every kind of animal was represented twice on that ark. — Bill Moyers

When properly applied, the kamae reflects the ninja's heart.
This means that our physical nature conforms to our intentions,
and there is no division between our interior and exterior
aspects. This state of integrated mind and body action is
totally natural, and can be observed readily in the movements
of animals as they interact with their environment. Only human
beings seem to develop the need to be trained in natural body
motion. — Masaaki Hatsumi

Humans are amphibians ... half spirit and half animal ... as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation
the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. — C.S. Lewis

Just as a brook forms no eddy so long as it meets with no obstructions, so human nature, as well as animal, is such that we do not really notice and perceive all that goes on in accordance with our will. If we were to notice it, then the reason for this would inevitably be that it did not go according to our will, but must have met with some obstacle. On the other hand, everything that obstructs, crosses, or opposes our will, and thus everything unpleasant and painful, is felt by us immediately, at once, and very plainly. Just as we do not feel the health of our whole body, but only the small spot where the shoe pinches, so we do not think of all our affairs that are going on perfectly well, but only of some insignificant trifle that annoys us. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it? — Joy Williams

[I believe] that animals have a worth in and of themselves, and that they are not inferior to human beings but rather just different from us, and that they really don't exist for us nor do they belong to us ... it should not be a question of how they should be treated within the context of their usefulness, or perceived usefulness, to us, but rather whether we have a right to use them at all. — Ingrid Newkirk

All growth is from within. This is evident in all nature. Every plant, every animal, every human is a living testimony to this great law, and the error of the ages is in looking for strength or power from without. — Charles F. Haanel

It was the first and only fight of his childhood, but it had taught him a valuable lesson about human nature, how people were just another species of animal, and like any animal, from the biggest predators, to the smallest scavengers, most human beings could only be pushed so far before they lashed out. — D.J. Molles

The only consistency in the way humans think about animals is inconsistency. — Hal Herzog

The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I've encountered to date. — Karen Davis

When we reflect upon the cruelties daily practised upon such of the animal creation as are given us for food, or which we ensnarefor our diversion, we shall be obliged to own that there is more of the savage in human nature than we are aware of. — Samuel Richardson

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

If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation. — John Maynard Keynes

Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal. — Robert Bellarmine

Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being? — Gregory Maguire

Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic. — Kenneth Clark

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

We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonising religion. It goes with being human. — John N. Gray

What's with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans."
"The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans."
"Could have fooled me."
"Humans are incidental."
"Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental?" I can't help but sound like I'm accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he wasn't part of the plan to wipe us out.
Or at least, I think he wasn't personally involved, but I don't really know that, do I?
"Your people have been doing it to all kinds of species."
"That's not the same."
"Why not? — Susan Ee

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all. — Ernest Becker

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity - the human brain - which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science. — Ivan Pavlov

When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity. — Henry Beston

Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils? — Ian Fleming

Man is merely a frequent effect, a monstrosity is a rare one, but both are equally natural, equally inevitable, equally part of the universal and general order. And what is strange about that? All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species ... all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal ... There is nothing clearly defined in nature. — John Dewey

Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need - the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose." Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without faith in reason in life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept, but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude. — Ruth Bernhard

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is ... difficult to think of a single natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. The cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature. — Simon Schama

Look at nature with science as a lens. The rock swarms, the clod dances; the mineral is but the vegetable stepping down, and the animal an ascending plant; the man, a beast extended; and the angel, a developed human soul. — C. A. Bartol

...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

The world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a selfperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained. — Stefan Zweig

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. — Donna J. Haraway

Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader's zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity? Scientific husbandry tells us to weed out the sick, the infirm, the weak. The ruthless efficiency of euthanasia initiatives and ethnic cleansing are but the programmatic application of Nietzsche's point: from any quantifiable cost-benefit analysis, the principles of animal husbandry should apply to the human race. Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to "hard reason" rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of "the noblest part of our nature."6 It is the human heart resonating with empathy, not the logical brain attuned to the mathematics of efficiency, that revolts at cruelty and inhumanity. In — Terryl L. Givens

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable ... Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely ... So important does nature regard this unseen combustion ... that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. — Loren Eiseley

Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals long for human company, reach out for human attention. — Diane Ackerman

Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics - all those profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable — Victor Hugo

Each and every tiny thing, every human, animal, bird, fish, insect, plant and stones on Earth Mother vibrate to their own individual frequency that creates its own language. Learning to listen and feel each vibration is not easy if all we hear is our own voice. We must be sensitive to the vibrations of the Earth so that we may understand nature and her needs. — Lee Standing Bear Moore

We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms. — Mark Fisher

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

Accustomed, as it is, to think of man as a dualism of mind and body, and to regard the former as "sensible" and the latter as a "dumb" animal, our cultture is an affront to the wisdom of nature and a ruinous exploitation of the human organism as a whole. — Alan W. Watts

It's human nature, we take a mile when we're given an inch. We're crazy. You see what we did to the animals! They don't even exist anymore! — Vince Staples

It must be stressed that there is nothing insulting about looking at people as animals. We are animals, after all. Homo sapiens is a species of primate, a biological phenomenon dominated by biological rules, like any other species. Human nature is no more than one particular kind of animal nature. Agreed, the human species is an extraordinary animal; but all other species are also extraordinary animals, each in their own way, and the scientific man-watcher can bring many fresh insights to the study of human affairs if he can retain this basic attitude of evolutionary humility. — Desmond Morris

The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety. — Edward Gibbon

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature. — Simone De Beauvoir

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal. — Henry Morton Stanley

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about. — Mauricio Lasansky

It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticized or shouted at, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colors, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile or dragon. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise (as when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank) when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. — Osamu Dazai

For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself. — George Lakoff

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get. — Robert Buettner

The mermaid is an archetypal image that represents a woman who is at ease in the great waters of life, the waters of emotion and sexuality. She shows us how to embrace our instinctive sexuality and sensuality so that we can affirm the essence of our feminine nature, the wisdom of our bodies, and the playfulness of our spirits. She symbolizes our connection with our deepest instinctive feelings, our wild and untamed animal nature that exists below the surface of outward personalities. She is able to respond to her mysterious sexual impulses without abandoning her more human, conscious side. What happened to the girls who dreamed of being mermaids? — Anita Johnston

Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals. — Winifred Holtby