Joe Clark Quotes

Life is so unlike theory.

But the wild is unpredictable, stuff does happen, and it's always when you're least expecting it.

Animals of all classes, old and young, shrink with instinctive fear from any strange object approaching them.

I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

You can't train a penguin to act. You kind of have to take what you get.

Dogs bark at what they don't understand.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

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.

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.

The Deer don't dineWhen a Wolf's about,And the PorcupineSticks his quill-points out.

One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.

Animals are unpredictable things, and so our life is unpredictable. It's a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you've got to really like it to stick it.

Wonderful things, horses. Never know what they will do, or won't do.

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

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

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

Many live in dread of what is coming. Why should we? The unknown puts adventure into life. ... The unexpected around the corner gives a sense of anticipation and surprise. Thank God for the unknown future.

We can never tell what is in store for us.

When we see an effect happen always in the same manner, we infer that it takes place by a natural necessity; as, for instance, that the sun will rise to morrow; but nature often deceives us, and will not submit to its own rules.

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.