Love Species Quotes & Sayings

The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. — Frans De Waal

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. — John Keats

Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him ... Flower and bird, two species never meant to mate. Yet at length the rose overcame her fear and from that single, forbidden union was born the red rose that Allah never intended the world to know. — Susan Kay

Love is only a feeling of curiousity more or less intense, grafted upon the inclination placed in us by nature that the species may be preserved. — Giacomo Casanova

The whip degrades; a severe father teaches his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies. — Robert Green Ingersoll

It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species - the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in Korea, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals - or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from Vietnam, just in time to napalm the Woodstock festival. But the man had lived. He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and - he hinted - a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations. We — Matthew Louis

I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species. — Alice Steinbach

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy. — George Jean Nathan

If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals ... Love and sex do indeed go together. — E. O. Wilson

By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject. — Alain De Botton

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths. — Reynolds Price

The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. — Daniel Quinn

As a species, tragedy dwells within us all. We push it to the back of our thoughts, but it is never so far gone that it cannot return, crashing and writhing into our souls: a rogue wave overturning a boat on a calm day. Tragedy is never more than a breath away. We hide from its certainty and go about our lives as though time can be wasted. Somewhere deep inside ourselves we know that we tell ourselves lies. We know that someday everything we love will be gone. — Logan Kain

We [people] have the power to destroy ourselves as well as the environment. As a species we love what I'd call brinks-person-ship, going right to the edge of disaster and somehow managing to pull back and recover. But my bet is still on the creative and playful and positive in the species. I think we will manage to survive and gradually turn things around. — Richard Bach

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love. — Stephen Jay Gould

His reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling - to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. — Emily Bronte

We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. — Melanie Joy

Don't you feel something magical when you're in love? ... I do, I certainly do ... but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It's a chemical thing in the brain. It's a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species. — Alan Lightman

Both humans and dogs love to play well into adulthood, and individuals from both species occasionally display evidence of having a conscience. — Jon Winokur

I was trying to discover examples of a living restoration, trying to go beyond discussions about correct historic colors, materials, and techniques.
I looked to the past for guidance, to find the graces we need to save. I want to be an importer. This is not nostalgia; I am not nostalgic. I am not looking for a way back. "From where will a renewal come to us, to us who have devastated the whole earthly globe?" asked Simone Weil. "Only from the past if we love it."
What I am looking for is the trick of having the same ax twice, for a restoration that renews the spirit, for work that transforms the worker. We may talk of saving antique linens, species, or languages; but whatever we are intent on saving, when a restoration succeeds, we rescue ourselves.
Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age — Howard Mansfield

Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him. — Nicole Krauss

Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale
a daydream."
"Which I can and will realise. I shall begin today. — Charlotte Bronte

Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so.

Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris — Rene Descartes

One thing that unites us all, one thing is universal among the human species; the anatomy. Big, small, fat, thin, colour or creed are irrelevant. Under the skin, under the flesh, we are one and the same. We desire the same things; love, money, power. All the things we can not have, not without cost. — Rob Shepherd

The most compassionate and peaceful thing you can do for yourself and others is to let go of the past, let go of the anger, let go of trying to hurt people that wronged you. There are thousands of people dying from cancer that wish they had someone to care about them and be with them during their final days. There are children being sold into sex trafficking and are hoping someone would rescue them. There are homeless people that wish they had something warm to wear or eat. There is an entire species being wiped out because not enough people care about our oceans. Today, remember that there is someone praying for the very things you take for granted. Spend your effort where God needs you to be
on the front lines of the war on earth, not on the battlefields of the past. — Shannon L. Alder

Consider again that dot [Earth]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. — Carl Sagan

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Love and friendship, two of life's abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both. — Lynda Obst

The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute. — Luce Irigaray

So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times. — Honore De Balzac

The availability of domesticated animal species played an important role in the prohibition of cannibalism and the development of religions of love and mercy in the states and empires of the Old World. Christianity, it may yet turn out, was more the gift of the lamb in the manger than the child who was born in it. — Marvin Harris

Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings. By living with you, I want to learn to love everyone and all species. If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth ... This is the real message of love. — Thich Nhat Hanh

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species. — Thich Nhat Hanh

It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of those predators are food for still other predators. And what's left over is food for the scavengers, who return to the earth nutrients needed by the green plants. It's a system that has worked magnificently for billions of years. Filmmakers understandably love footage of gore and battle, but any naturalist will tell you that the species are not in any sense at war with one another. The gazelle and lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn't massacre them as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion in the midst. — Daniel Quinn

Money, power, love, sex (until they get married), adulation, children, and control. Of these, children cause the most trouble. Women also want equal rights and equal pay for equal work, and I agree with them 100%. Though on some days it is hard to figure out how a species that controls 97% of the money and all the pussy can be downtrodden. — Larry L. King

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. — Krista Tippett

Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. — Alain De Botton

My sister and I may have been crafted of the same genetic clay, baked in the same uterine kiln, but we were disparate species, doomed never to love each other except blindly. — Judith Kelman

There is no future in it, Will Henry," he said pensively. "The future belongs to science. The fate of our species will be determined by the likes of Edison and Tesla, not Wordsworth or Whitman. The poets will lie upon the shores of Babylon and weep, poisoned by the fruit that grows from the ground where the Muses' corpses rot. The poets' voices will be drowned out by the gears of progress. I foresee the day when all sentiment is reduced to a chemical equation in our brains - hope, faith, even love - their exact locations pinned down and mapped out, so we may point to it and say, 'Here, in this region of our cerebral cortex, lies the soul.' — Rick Yancey

I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know. — Allan J. Hamilton

Denis could think of no logical reason why he should not attempt to mate with Beth Cooper.
There were no laws explicitly against it.
They were of the same species, and had complementary sex organs, most likely, based on extensive mental modeling Denis had done. — Larry Doyle

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth. — M. Scott Peck

So our narcissism has bared forth an unflattering nakedness that shames our species. But this is humanity. This is our condition. — Zack Love

Yes, the human race is a small species in an infinite universe filled with many other planets and many other things, but though small; this race is bearer of very great and big things: Destiny, Virtue, Hope, Love ... and that's what makes this species different. That's what makes this species very shiny and very visible and very important, in a whole, whole, big, big, vast, expanding universe! — C. JoyBell C.

I love to read, and so I've been reading everything I can, not intensely, but I love to read so I read "Origin of Species" by Darwin and I can't make head or tail of E=MC squared by Einstein, but I try to baffle my way through that. — Anthony Hopkins

What she had believed was indignation or rage or a deep intolerance for injustice came down to this: she was irreducibly in love with this bewitching planet, this thrilling life, this heartbreaking species she belonged to, with its capacity for stupefying destruction and breathtaking magnanimity. — Thrity Umrigar

All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He'd prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species. — Nicole Krauss

Love, she reflected bitterly, wasn't something you bargained with or negotiated with ... it lived by its own rules. Love appeared when you didn't want it and refused to go. It was like an invasive species that entered your garden without warning, and proceeded to grow wildly out of control, resistant to every method employed to kill it.
Basically, love was pigweed. — Lisa Kleypas

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free. — Ursula K. Le Guin

These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet. — James Oroc

The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium. — Machado De Assis

Music is the eternal language of love for every living species. — Debasish Mridha

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eves the nebulae, and universes in our cells. — John Steinbeck

When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman. — Abhijit Naskar

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice - all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the "good of the species" and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony. — Robert Wright

He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species
sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain. — Clifford D. Simak

So you love me," said Petra softly when the kiss ended.
I'm a raging mass of hormones thet I'm too young to understand," said Bean. "You're a female of a closely related species. According to all the best primatologists, I really have no choice."
That's nice," she said ... — Orson Scott Card

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly. — Alain De Botton

Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. "I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature." He shook his head. "The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese 'the little people,' I've been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study. — David Cronenberg

necessarily surface in conscious awareness, because this type of anticipation resides in the deep and wordless part of the brain. Much of what we do as partners is fundamentally about survival and our beastly, instinctual selves. In fact, we could say the human species has survived over millennia due to the simple imperative "Thou shall not get killed." Love and war are both conditions of our human brain. Arguably, though, the brain is wired first and foremost for war, rather than for love. Its primary function is to ensure we survive as individuals and as a species. And it is very, very good at this. — Stan Tatkin

One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects ... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being ... — Mary Shelley

Our survival depends on the healing power of love, intimacy and relationships. As individuals. As communities. As a country. As a culture. Perhaps even as a species. — Dean Ornish

Though there is a benevolence due to all mankind, none can question but a superior degree of it is to be paid to a father, a wife, or child. In the same manner, though our love should reach to the whole species, a greater proportion of it should exert itself towards that community in which Providence has placed us. This is our proper sphere of action, the province allotted us for the exercise of our civil virtues, and in which alone we have opportunities of expressing our goodwill to mankind. — Joseph Addison

There is no greater species better crafted for emotional terrorism than women. We slice away at the Achilles until our victims are left feeling completely devoid of value and unfit for love, friendship, and in extreme cases, air. We've been bred to see others' successes as a direct assault to our own, and this is especially true when it comes to weight. Seeing someone who is heavier than us viewing themselves in a positive light is detrimental to our own self-esteem. So we attack and tear down until eventually that person feels as bad about herself as we do about ourselves. — Brittany Gibbons

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love. — Richard Louv

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first - and lost - home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want. — Dean Koontz

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many people love grey squirrels, but the reality is that they are a real problem for some of our most threatened native species, like the red squirrel and dormouse. It is not realistic, practical or even desirable to completely eradicate grey squirrels, but we must control them effectively. — Jim Knight

Our species is in trouble because we fight too much. We fight ourselves, each other, our planet, and God. Our fear-ridden ways are threatening our survival. A thoroughly loving person is like an evolutionary mutation, manifesting a being that puts love first and thus creates the context in which miracles occur. — Marianne Williamson

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We have within ourselves as a species, to find the beauty in everything. And once we master it, we will then be some of the gentlest creatures that ever evolved. — Tom Althouse

Soul-mated pairs are becoming an endangered species. — Stacey Jay

Instead I just stand there, tears running down my cheeks in nameless emotion that tastes of joy and of grief. Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost. The grasses remember the nights they were consumed by fire, lighting the way back with a conflagration of love between species. Who today even knows what that means? I drop to my knees in the grass and I can hear the sadness, as if the land itself was crying for its people: Come home. Come home.
There are often other walkers here. I suppose that's what it means when they put down the camera and stand on the headland, straining to hear above the wind with that wistful look, the gaze out to sea. They look like they're trying to remember what it would be like to love the world. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

You can't condemn an entire species of people because of the actions of one man. — Elizabeth Richards

In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love. — Warren Farrell

Like most girls, I want a lot. Fame and fortune. Equal rights. Shoes no one else has. But I'd trade all that in for the perfect guy. (Don't tell me there's something wrong with that. I don't know of a single person who doesn't spend most of her time thinking about love.) Anyway, ever since I could think, I have been imagining and reimagining the exact sort of boy I want to love and who would love me back. Basically, I imagine someone who has all the good attributes of the male species and whose bad ones wouldn't ruin my life. — Sarah Miller

Homosexuality is the most beautiful aspect of humanity. For its existence is proof that altruism is natural; it is to demonstrate that the theory of the "survival of the fittest" can only apply to the species as a whole, and that reproduction is insufficient to secure our place in the great jungle of life, which means being nice is a more stable evolutionary strategy than making kids; and if the homosexual is attracted to religion or to art - or, in smaller societies, to shamanism or caring for other people's children - is this not due to his or her search for purpose? If so, then what we call purpose must be something that encompasses all modes of life. What we call love must be greater than child rearing or caring for a mate. — Anthony Marais

One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love. — Honore De Balzac

As a species, the look of another of our species into our eyes has a great power. It can mean a lot of different things: aggression, love. — Chris Milk

But we live on the cusp of a Renaissance in consciousness of who we truly are and, thus, we can now begin to thrive in this exciting age of our humanity's journey toward a greater life and a more fundamentally intelligent evolution of our species. — Martha Char Love

I would love to compose more fantasy music, whether it's for a film or a game. That genre has so much opportunity for harmonic experimentation, not to mention all the interesting instruments that become available when composing music for alien species and other worlds. — Jason Graves

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love. — James Arthur

Spiritually, trees play a unique role in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, from the Garden of Eden to the Cross of Christ. Biologically, in great forest communities, they help sustain life on our planet, giving off oxygen, anchoring soil, keeping stream and rivers clear, and providing habitation for thousands of species. How can religious persons not care about the widespread destruction of these creatures of God? We need to love them as our very selves, as neighbors in earth's community of life. — Elizabeth A. Johnson

Although we have, in theory, abolished human slavery, recognized women's rights, and stopped child labor, we continue to enslave other species who, if we simply pay attention, show quite clearly that they experience parental love, pain, and the desire for freedom, just as we do. — Ingrid Newkirk

We begin to understand marriage as the insistently practical union that it is. We begin to understand it, that is, as it is represented in the traditional marriage ceremony, those vows being only a more circumstantial and practical way of saying what the popular songs say dreamily and easily: "I will love you forever"
a statement that, in this world, inescapably leads to practical requirements and consequences because it proposes survival as a goal. Indeed, marriage is a union much more than practical, for it looks both to our survival as a species and to the survival of our definition as human beings
that is, as creatures who make promises and keep them, who care devotedly and faithfully for one another, who care properly for the gifts of life in this world. — Wendell Berry

Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn't need MDs to know how to be proud of her. — Anthony Marra

It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love. — Voltaire

If emotions were universal, then in one sense he was not alone, never had been alone, and never could be alone....No pain or happiness was unique. All humanity drank from the same river of emotion; and by drinking, every race, religion, and nationality became one indivisible species. — Dean Koontz

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. — Nicole Krauss

The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species. — Marlon Brando

We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy. — Dean Koontz

He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to loved or hated again. — Emily Bronte

Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species. — Frank Herbert

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species ... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. — John Steinbeck

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. — Ben Fountain

Some people talk about polyamory as the next logical step for our species. A sexual free-for-all without exclusive relationships, similar to the free love hippie movement of the 60s, where everyone is eternally single and can date as many people at the same time as they want and sleep with whoever they want, whenever they want, as if having sex with someone were no different than playing ping pong. Call — Oliver Markus