Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.

Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.

Healthy parakeets have the nervous energy of tennis players.

Cats aren't really friendly, they're just cozying up to the dominant life-form as a hedge against extinction.

Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

First be a good animal.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

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.

If you come to think of it, you never see deer, dogs and rabbits worrying about their menus and yet they run much faster than humans.

I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose that.

Every animal loves itself.

Well, I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man.

Reason and action are congeneric and homogenous, two aspects of the same phenomenon.

As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, 'Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous.' Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

When I watch species other than my own, their instinct's wisdom is what most impresses and disturbs me.

[Footnote:] To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver -- the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

If frogs had side pockets, they'd carry hand guns.

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

My father gave me a bat for Christmas. The first time I tried to play with it, it flew away.

I remember just looking at this lioness, she was staring at me, and we just had this weird connection.