Henry Beston Quotes

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth.

Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.

I really love learning about animals. I pull from a deck of spirit animal cards. You pull one, and it's about 50 or 60 different animals, and then that day you read whichever animal you pull. And it kind of gives you insight.

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.

In 1968, I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry, and unhappy like we do.

Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

Perhaps that is part of the animals' role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to that most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one.

Is there a more mysterious idea than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of animals?

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any.

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.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.

"Animals are happy," said the queen. "They run no risk of going to hell." "They are there already," replied Josiana.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

Animals are nicer than humans and they're conscious beings. If you stick your grandmother in an oven, she will probably be tasty. But is that any reason to eat your grandmother?

Animals are good to think with.

Animal rights is a part of my everyday life. When you live by example, you create a certain level of awareness. Friends of mine - people I have never discussed animal rights or vegetarianism with - are adopting vegetarian habits because they see it.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.

I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude.... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

I call animals "guardians of Being," especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it's through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.