Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Quotes

Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.

I am mad for nature writing. I want to get inside the head of every creature in the world, even ants.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It's about elephants, and doesn't have any people in it. It will be a live action film - I don't know how much I can say about it, since I still don't know too much about it.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

I never thought I could learn much from a dog or cat. They sleep when we sleep. They eat when we eat. I'm into observing animals being as wild as they can be in a captive environment.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

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

Dogs are the only mammals that will actually stare and look into a human's eyes.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

A dog is a vehicle, you know; a dog is a window to Mother Nature, and that's the closest species we have.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

I think that there are many aspects to the relationship between humans and animals. But briefly, humans appear to have always been fascinated by them from the time of cave paintings and before.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren't the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

If dogs could talk it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

I'm really an animal guy. I express myself in different ways as an animal.

I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.