Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

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.

I want to reconnect to my animal life.

Every man has a wild animal in him.

Only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them.

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.

There are no wild animals until man makes them so.

We're animals. We're violent.

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

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

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day.

And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.

Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!

Animals fascinate me because you can find a force, an energy, a fear that also exists in sex.

How we act with each other really reveals our most animal instincts.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.

Since I’m presuming you don’t mean you finally bought him a leash, let me say simply that there is a big difference between allowing an animal to ravage you and allowing yourself to be ravaged. One is common. The other is art. It is planned. Crafted, even. Only capable of being done by a master.

Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.

I'm not over-fond of animals. I am merely astounded by them.

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.