J. M. Coetzee Quotes

The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

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

Animals are thinking, feeling creatures. They're sensitive.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

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.

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

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

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.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

I would like to visit a dog's mind to know what he's thinking and feeling.

People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

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

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.

Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that's not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we're part of a family.

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

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.