Franz Marc Quotes

There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.

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

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

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

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?

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.

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.

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

Every animal is related to its own constitution and the consciousness of it.

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.

There's animals like us existing and thinking and giving interviews on Australian television.

If you look into their [chimpanzees] eyes, you know you're looking into a thinking mind. They teach us that we are not the only beings with personalities, minds capable of rational thought, altruism and a sense of humor. That leads to new respect for other animals, respect for the environment and respect for all life.

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.

The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

The soul of animals is characterized by two faculties, (a) the faculty of discrimination which is the work of thought and sense, and (b) the faculty of originating local movement.

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

The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man - whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.

To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.

We need another and a wiser and a perhaps more mystical concept of animals.

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

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.

I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.