Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

There's an unseen force which lets birds know when you've just washed your car.

Our instinctual understanding of reality is the same as most other animals.

Animals are a continuous source of inspiration and wonder to me. I would love to play a dog.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

Do not despise the fish because they are absolutely unable to speak or to reason, but fear lest you may be even more unreasonable than they by resisting the command of the Creator. Listen to the fish, who through their actions all but utter this word: 'We set out on this long journey for the perpetuation of our species.'

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

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

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

If the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

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.

The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.

If animals had reason, they would act just as ridiculous as we menfolks do.

It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

How Instinct varies in the grov'ling swine.

The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.

Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.