D. H. Lawrence Quotes

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Men need knowledge in order to overpower their passions and master their prejudices.

We're all men, not machines. We make mistakes.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

It is just man's turning away from instinct--his opposing himself to instinct--that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature andseeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

You don't take your cat with you to go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn't polite, but because he's a cat.

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

Don't allow your animal nature to rule your reason.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

We are not made for law, we are made for love.

Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.

In our inherent contradictions as humans, and in order to validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others. But it is in acknowledging the pain of others that we achieve fully our humanity.

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.

How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?

We can't love our neighbors till we know how crooked their hearts are.

We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.

Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

You have to see through one's faults before you see their need.

I think I'd like to be remembered as someone who really helped people to have a little humility and realize that we are part of the animal kingdom not separated from it.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

I know little about nature and hardly anything about men.