Sentient Quotes & Sayings

What marks the transition from non-sentient to sentient beings? A model of increasing complexity based on evolution through natural selection is simply a descriptive hypothesis, a kind of euphemism for "mystery," and not a satisfactory explanation. — Dalai Lama XIV

You have no idea the power generated each time somebody is told a story. When a conscious, sentient mind willingly ignores what is real, what is fact, and instead chooses to invest in people and places that never existed ... It's magnificent. — Derek Landy

One of the remarks made by farmers at their public discussion of these problems suggest that they are rapidly ceasing to think of animals as sentient beings at all. If you handle vast numbers of creatures which are in any case going to die soon, it is, I suppose, easy to get into a state of mind in which they seem to be merely machines. — Kingsley Martin

When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that it is part of our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can't practice when distracted but know that we can't, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on. 51 Deepening Tonglen IN TONGLEN, after genuinely connecting with the pain and your ability to open and let go, then take the practice a step further and do it for all sentient beings. — Pema Chodron

Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf. — Victoria Moran

Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running. — Ken Ludwig

While there exist many cultures and sub-cultures on Earth, they all can be understood by a simple equation. The males will do whatever it takes to acquire physical intimacy from the females. In cultures where the females require education, career, and a house, the men work to acquire those things. In cultures where the women require bravado, pride, and a propensity for violence, the men acquire those traits. And in cultures where the females require nothing, the men do that, too. The fact that many females give away sex for free then wonder why the men in their lives do not show more ambition has been submitted as evidence in Alliance court that humans lack sufficient intelligence to be considered sentient. — Aaron Lee Yeager

Completely trusting a way that you can't do by yourself, that you do with all sentient beings, is immediate liberation. — Reb Anderson

I'm a coward. A willing coward, complicit in my own fall. I've never told him that I love him, as if refusing to say it aloud would somehow shield us both, but it hasn't. Like an untamed, sentient thing, full of I am and yet estranged from me, my heart discerns its own truth and knows that this omission is a lie. — Tammara Webber

Factory farming is the attitude that commodifies sentient life. — Gene Baur

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it. — James A. Baldwin

I got body snatched by an alien." McClane grumbled a protest. "A sentient alien armor and weapons system," Riley clarified. "Very sophisticated. Very unique. Very much a smartass. His name's McClane — J. Fally

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. — Peter Watts

Memories of bright and colorful worlds swirl together. The one thing in common is the brown mud on my boots. Slogging through battlefields. Noticing details like how the insides of sentient things have much in common: the same blood that colors red in the air, the sacs for breathing, the sacs for pumping blood through tubes, the tendrils for turning thoughts into things. — Hugh Howey

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine. — A.S. Byatt

The ubiquitous semi-sentient utility routine running in her macrocellular clusters responded immediately by unfolding a basic array of mental icons, slender lines of blue fairy light that superimposed themselves within her wobbly vision. She frowned. If she was reading their efficiency modes correctly, her biononics had — Peter F. Hamilton

As for my own religious practice, I try to live my life pursuing what I call the Bodhisattva ideal. According to Buddhist thought, a Bodhisattva is someone on the path to Buddhahood wo dedicates themselves entirely to helping all other sentient beings towards release from suffering. The word Bodhisattva can best be understood by translating the Bodhi and Sattva separately: Bodhi means the understanding or wisdom of the ultimate nature of reality, and a Sattva is someone who is motivated by universal compassion. The Bodhissatva ideal is thus the aspiration to practise infinite compassion with infinite wisdom. releasing sentient beings from suffering. — Dalai Lama XIV

These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat. — Richard Wagner

It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible. — Dimitar Sasselov

Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visonary, will be the one to die. — Michael Cunningham

Without the reference points of pleasure and pain, people invent imaginary and abstract standards for ethics that are divorced from reality and generate vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Pleasure is the only real ethical guide. It returns our conversations about ethics to the natural context where these conversations belong: the well-being of sentient beings. — Hiram Crespo

1. Earth, birthplace of the human race, a species much like our own, capable of great compation, and great violence. For in our quest to protect the humans, a deeper revelation dawns, our worlds have met before.


2. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.


3. I am Optimus Prime, leader of the autobots.

4. We hunt for what remains our decepticon foes hiding in different countries around the globe. — Optimus Prime

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. — Dalai Lama

I dislike this whole business of experimentation on animals, unless there's some very good and altogether exceptional reason to this very case. The thing that gets me is that it's not possible for the animals to understand why they are being called upon to suffer. They don't suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it's for anyone's. They're given no choice, and there is no central authority responsible for deciding whether what's done is morally justifiable. These experiment animals are just sentient objects; they're useful because they are able to react; sometimes precisely because they're able to feel fear and pain. And they're used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights or choices in the matter. — Richard Adams

But that don't mean I don't love America, by God, though I hate these damn hunters, all they wanta do is level a gun at a helpless sentient being and murder it, for every sentient being or living creature these actual pricks kill they will be reborn a thousand times to suffer the horrors of samsara and damn good for 'em too." "Hear, — Jack Kerouac

Just as a chariot is verbalized, in dependence on collections of parts, so conventionally a sentient being, is set up depending on the mental and physical aggregates — Gautama Buddha

How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last. — Dan Chaon

We should be able to refuse to live if the price of living be the torture of sentient beings. — Mahatma Gandhi

I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. — Paul Stamets

When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda. — Pema Chodron

Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind - and her relationship to other sentient beings - above whatever else she might achieve in life. — Ethan Nichtern

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood. — Philip K. Dick

Abram: .. One [Sentient] often believes it best to choose the higher path over the companionship of another. But, this circumstance draws to mind a point which Seers might forget to easily.
Lily: What's that?
Abram: That Love is the higher path — Jennifer DeLucy

Aren't you sentient human beings? Or are you living like animals for the moment only? In that case by all means indulge in charity and cure each petty suffering that meets your eye; but don't meddle with the revolution, for its task is to cure all sufferings present and to come. — Albert Camus

Dale's face is older. Just a little. Around the eyes and mouth. The skin of his neck. The back of his hands. Maybe not, he thinks, turning on the faucet, letting the water grow warm then hot.
He begins shaving his lubricated chin and cheeks. Chrysalis hibernation slows things down, but it doesn't stop them, not all together, and he finds himself to currently resemble something between a derelict and a college student, neither one ringing particularly desirable in his present mood. — David Edward Wagner

The whole world is cause and effect; excluding this, there is no sentient being. from factors which are empty, empty factors originate.
those who impute origination to even very subtle entities are unwise and have not seen the meaning of conditioned origination.
there is nothing to be denied and nothing to be affirmed. see the real correctly, for he who sees the real correctly is released — Nagarjuna

Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being ... In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself. — Dalai Lama

As long as space endures, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world. — Dalai Lama XIV

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life. — Ruben Dario

The beautiful truth about service is that we are afforded countless opportunities to be its vehicle. Every interaction with another is an opportunity to serve. From simply letting someone into your lane in traffic, to holding a door, to a kind smile. This is all service. I am humbled by this simple truth. We are given the opportunity to express the most meaningful use of our lives every time we interact with another sentient being. — Chris Matakas

Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children. — Michael Morpurgo

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans. — Gary L. Francione

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths, Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts. — Sri Aurobindo

There are two rules of action for all sentient beings, for all galaxies, and for all time. Where these rules are honored, above and beyond the manufactured laws of government, there is always peace, freedom and abundance. The first rule of action is: Feed the poor. — Robin Gregory

I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed but what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals. — John Green

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. — Albert Einstein

The poor Geordies are in the process of being rebuffed by every sentient human being whose ambition in life is more than simply to pocket six million quid for having been a failure and run for the hills. They want beautiful, flowing football and tangible success, at St James' Park. Fine. I, meanwhile, want Jessica Alba and the Nobel prize for literature. I make my prospects slightly more realistic. — Rod Liddle

And if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for roots and such - the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn't even know any difference between despair and victory. — William Faulkner

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Fools! You think of "god" as a sentient being. God is the word used to represent a force. This force created nothing, it just helps things along. It does not answer prayers, although it may make you think of a way to solve a problem. It has the power to influence you, but not decide for you. — Diogenes

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. — David Pearce

Veganism is about nonviolence:
nonviolence to other sentient beings;
nonviolence to yourself;
nonviolence to the earth. — Gary L. Francione

On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back. — Gore Verbinski

If a man loses one-third of his skin he dies; if a tree loses one-third of its bark, it too dies. If the Earth is a 'sentient being', would it not be reasonable to expect that if it loses one-third of its trees and vegetable covering, it will also die? — Richard St. Barbe Baker

He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy. — Jonathan Franzen

I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species. — Daniel H. Wilson

Now that we have understood the nature of speciesism and seen the consequences it has for nonhuman animals it is time to ask: What can we do about it? There are many things that we can and should do about speciesism. We should, for instance, write to our political representatives about the issues discussed in this book; we should make our friends aware of these issues; we should educate our children to be concerned about the welfare of all sentient beings; and we should protest publicly on behalf of nonhuman animals whenever we have an effective opportunity to do so. While — Peter Singer

Sentience is not an end in itself. It is a means to the end of staying alive. Sentient beings use sensations of pain and suffering to escape situations that threaten their lives and sensations of pleasure to pursue situations that enhance their lives. Just as humans will often endure excruciating pain in order to remain alive, animals will often not only endure but inflict on themselves excruciating pain - as when gnawing off a paw caught in a trap - in order to live. Sentience is what evolution has produced in order to ensure the survival of certain complex organisms. To claim that a being who has evolved to develop a consciousness of pain and pleasure has no interest in remaining alive is to say that conscious beings have no interest in remaining conscious, a most peculiar position to take. — Gary L. Francione

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me.
Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that. — David Wong

Science cannot tell you whether abortion is wrong, but it can point out that the (embryological) continuum that seamlessly joins a non-sentient foetus to a sentient adult is analogous to the (evolutionary) continuum that joins humans to other species. If the embryological continuum appears to be more seamless, this is only because the evolutionary continuum is divided by the accident of extinction. Fundamental principles of ethics should not depend on the accidental contingencies of extinction.* To repeat, science cannot tell you whether abortion is murder, but it can warn you that you may be being inconsistent if you think abortion is murder but killing chimpanzees is not. You cannot have it both ways. — Richard Dawkins

Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke. — Neil Gaiman

We're cognizant, curious beings, capable of philosophical thought, nuclear physics, repeating Nerf weapons, global consciousness, Glade air fresheners, and sentient automobiles. But we're assholes first. — Nick Offerman

When you accept everything, everything is beyond dimensions. The earth is not great nor a grain of sand small. In the realm of Great Activity picking up a grain of sand is the same as taking up the whole universe. To save one sentient being is to save all sentient beings. Your efforts of this moment to save one person is the same as the eternal merit of Buddha. — Shunryu Suzuki

When a tragedy occurs, do not say that your thoughts are with the victims. People do not need thoughts, they need blankets, they need food, they need water, they need shelter. They need a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. All the cumulative thoughts from every sentient being that has ever existed is worth less than a single glass of water given to a thirsty person. - Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Eighteenth Binding, Fourteenth Stanza — Aaron Lee Yeager

The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. — Paul Di Filippo

Expectation loiters in the DNA of every sentient being; when you tell yourself or a loved one, 'Don't get your hopes up,' you're fighting ancient genetic programming. — Martha Beck

I think the occasional appearance of the UFO is a very oblique pop-cultural reference that anyone who was alive and sentient in the late 1970s will get right away. — Hank Stuever

We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering. — Seneca The Younger

(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult
Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a
certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,
they're certainly psychopathic) — Peter Watts

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world's becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming. — Tim Ingold

Fundamental security comes from realizing that you have broken through something. You reflect back and realize that you used to be extraordinarily paranoid and neurotic, watching each step you made, thinking you might lose your sanity, that situations were always threatening in some way. Now you are free of all those fears and preconceptions. You discover that you have something to give rather than having to demand from others, having to grasp all the time. For the first time, you are a rich person, you contain basic sanity. You have something to offer, you are able to work with your fellow sentient beings, you do not have to reassure yourself anymore. Reassurance implies a mentality of poverty--you are checking yourself, "Do I have it? How could I do it?" But the bodhisattva's delight in his richness is based upon experience rather than theory or wishful thinking. It is so, directly, fundamentally. He is fundamentally rich and so can delight in generosity. — Chogyam Trungpa

All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings ... And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness — Ken Wilber

It is time to fill the world with strong and powerful deeds. It is common knowledge that no great captain in the world has ever destroyed all of his enemies and lived with a sense of satisfaction. If one enemy is killed, two more will appear. It is important we cultivate love and compassion to all the sentient beings which is the way to bring peace to all. — Dalai Lama

Creation is a sentient and instinctual flow that determines where to go and what to change or omit. — Shaun McNiff

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program. — Vernor Vinge

For as long as space remains,
For as long as sentient beings remain,
Until then may I too remain
To dispel the miseries of the world. — Acharya Shantideva

My brain needs to be a sentient being that way it can say, "Nadiyah. NADIYAH!! I know where you're going with this and you need to stop! — Nadiyah Abdul-Khaliq

Even when dreaming, if the sentient beings who dwell in the three lower realms are witnessed, then at that moment one should pray to sever the continuity of their negativity.
- Gathering of Precious Qualities — Pema Lungtok Gyatso

Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture. — Coleman Barks

Isn't that weird?" I said. "All the different types of sentient species in the universe, and we're all different, but we all drink coffee. — John Scalzi

In the static mode an observer may unify the pieces of a puzzle, but only as a blueprint - kinetics add the third dimention of depth, and the fourth of history. The motion, however, must be on the human scale, which happens also to be that of birds, waves, and clouds. Were a bullet to be made sentient, it still would see or hear or smell or feel nothing in land or water or air except its target. So, too, with a passenger in any machine that goes faster than a Model A. As speed increases, reality thins and becomes at the pace of a jet airplane no more substantial than a computer readout.
Running suits a person who seeks to look inward, through a fugue of pain, to study the dark self. A person afraid of the dark had better walk - strenuous enough for the rhythm of the feet to pace those of heart and lungs, relaxed enough to let him look outward, through joy, to a bright creation. — Harvey Manning

Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead. — Dalai Lama

To feel overflowing love and almost unbearable compassion for all living creatures is the best way to fulfil the wishes of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Even if for the moment you cannot actually help a sentient being in an external way, meditate on love and compassion constantly over the months and years until compassion is knit inseparably into the very fabric of your mind. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine. — Marty Rubin

I love all animals. I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales - sentient life - insects, reptiles. — Nicolas Cage

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet
in the wrong universe. — Revilo P. Oliver

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end
that end that comes to our youth and hope. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Civilization is very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics. — Amish Tripathi

What I love about 'Big Hero 6', with Baymax himself - this sentient creature who's actually a learning robot - with each experience, this naive and gullible creature becomes more aware of issues. — Roy Conli

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being. — Daniel Dennett

Wordless is not the same of expressionless. All phenomenon of the universe, audible and inaudible, tangible and intangible, sentient and insentient, are the clear and ceaseless expression of the buddha nature. — John Daido Loori

THE INNER BUDDHA As Jigme Lingpa said, the moon has all the qualities necessary for its reflection to appear on the surface of a clear lake. If the moon did not have a shape or substance, and if it didn't reflect the light of the sun, it would not be possible for it to appear on the water's surface. Furthermore, the quality of clear water is that it can reflect, and when the moon and the water - two entirely separate entities - are perfectly aligned without any obstruction between them, a reflection of the moon will appear effortlessly, without intention. Similarly, our inner Buddha has qualities that enable it to manifest effortlessly and without intention. When there are no obstacles, the Buddha will reflect spontaneously in sentient beings who have the merit. Some — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violence to all sentient beings. It is a movement that seeks fundamental justice for all. It is an emerging peace movement that does not stop at the arbitrary line that separates humans from nonhumans. — Gary L. Francione

the Culture had placed its bets - long before the Idiran war had been envisaged - on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture. — Iain M. Banks

Are you a vegetarian?' I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.
She nods.
'Why?'
'Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten
well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.'
'Really?'
She laughs. 'No. I'm just sick of the question. I mean, I'm a vegetarian because I think it's wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment. — David Levithan

And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we've done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. — Louisa Hall

NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?! — John Green

For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings. — Dalai Lama XIV

Typical sentient's psyche is a spiderweb. Pull on the right thread and you will get the desired result. Praise them and they will like you. Ridicule them and they'll hate you. Greedy can be bought, timid can be frightened, smart can be persuaded, but the zealots are immune to money, fear, or reason. A zealot's psyche is a tightrope. They have severed everything else in favor of their goal. They will pay any price for their victory, and that makes them infinitely more dangerous. — Ilona Andrews