Christopher Moore Quotes

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for animal researchers is to come up with tests that can distinguish between the two.

I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans, they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose, they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion, they just have another type of intelligence.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

I am into nature and seeing whales. I went whale-watching, and I was really looking forward to that, but when you see it on TV and you see other programs do it, you're seeing close-ups of these massive creatures, and the music that's added gives you a certain feeling.

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.

People generally thought that sharks are dumb eating machines. After some study, I began to realize that these 'gangsters' of the deep had gotten a bad rap.

Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

I've never had any intimate relationships with a dolphin.

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

I went whale watching once. It was very similar to watching people on a boat become disappointed.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

The porpoises said hello to Molly. She told them all her teeth were green.

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.

What is denominated discretion in man we call cunning in brutes.

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.