Walt Whitman Quotes

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long.

Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.

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.

When I'm around animals, I don't pay attention to people.

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

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

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.

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

Dogs and other animals - goats, donkeys, cows, a grumpy rooster - continue to change my writing life.

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

Never break a promise to an animal. They're like babies—they won't understand.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.

Animals have always left me with a curiosity about human nature. I trust animals more than most people.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.

I had not spent a ton of time around animals as a kid.

Animals have personalities like people and must be studied.

Animals make us Human.

I have read a great deal about what animals dream, but none of it has ever really satisfied me. I believe they dream exactly the way we dream, and about everything in their lives--that they have good dreams and bad dreams in almost direct proportion, as we do, to whether their lives have been more good than bad. Unfortunately, because the majority of animals have it so much tougher than we do, I believe that the majority of dreams, except in the most fortunate petdom, are bad.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.

We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Animals are good to think with.