63 Inspiring Animal Quotes

Animals have long been a source of wonder and inspiration, offering profound insights into the world around us. Their wisdom can be seen in their actions, relationships, and sheer resilience, serving as reminders of the beauty and complexity of life. Whether it’s the loyalty of a dog or the grace of a deer, animals can teach us lessons about love, strength, and harmony. In this collection, we've gathered 63 of the most inspiring quotes that reflect the spirit and essence of our animal counterparts. These quotes celebrate the diverse ways in which animals touch our lives, encouraging us to appreciate the unique connection we share with them. Let these words inspire you to see the animal kingdom with a renewed perspective, fostering a deeper sense of empathy and respect.

1. “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.” - Mark Twain

2. “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” - Henry Beston

3. “If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry. ” - Dave Barry

4. “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.” - Alice Walker

5. “I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.” - Ellen DeGeneres

6. “My favorite animal is steak.” - Fran Lebowitz

7. “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.” - Rebecca Solnit

8. “Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.''If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.''But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'They moved on.” - Philip Pullman

9. “If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.” - Temple Grandin

10. “People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. “I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.” - Margaret Atwood

12. “There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham - all a sham, James, and it won't stand when things come to be turned inside out and put down for what they” - Anna Sewell

13. “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.” - Milan Kundera

14. “Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.” - Will Cuppy

15. “When I got started again, I drove slower and felt smaller. I think it does us all good to get looked at like that now and then by a wild animal.” - Bailey White

16. “The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

17. “If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.” - Matthew Scully

18. “When I can't ride anymore, I shall keep horses as long as I can hobble around with a bucket and a wheelbarrow. When I can't hobble, I shall roll my wheelchair out to the fence of the field where my horses graze and watch them. Whether by wheelbarrow or wheelchair, I will do likewise to keep alive-as long as I can do as best I can-my connection with horses.” - Monica Dickens

19. “Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning.” - Melanie Joy

20. “The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.” - Christopher Hitchens

21. “Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?” - Jonathan Safran Foer

22. “People who really appreciated animals always asked their names.” - Lilian Jackson Braun

23. “I have never heard anyone say, 'Oh, ick! A horse!” - Elinor Goulding Smith

24. “A Robin Redbreast in a CagePuts all Heaven in a Rage.A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.A Dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood.Each outcry of the hunted HareA fiber from the Brain does tear.” - William Blake

25. “In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.” - Matthew Scully

26. “To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself--even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.” - Melanie Joy

27. “The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position” - Christine Stevens

28. “If a person fights, that's their own choice," Angel says. "But getting two roosters to fight or two dogs like pit bulls to fight, the animals don't have a choice there. They can't decide not to fight.” - Rescue Ink

29. “If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” - Francis of Assisi

30. “Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

31. “Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people” - Jonathan Franzen

32. “Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.” - Betty White

33. “I never fancied cats much till I found the First Mate," he remarked, to the accompaniment of the Mate's tremendous purrs. "I saved his life, and when you've saved a creature's life you're bound to love it. It's next thing to giving life.” - L.M. Montgomery

34. “God loves and cares for creation and has the right to expect this loving care be replicated by humans. Creation exists, not for the glory of humanity, but for the glory of God. God has the right to see that earthly creatures are free to live according to their nature and without unnecessary abuse, exploitation, and pain, so that their lives can glorify their Creator.…[S]ince God values and cares for all creation, creation has a derived right to be valued and cared for by humans for God’s glory.” - Richard A. Young

35. “I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.” - Mary Taylor Young

36. “The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.” - Émile Zola

37. “Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.” - Mark Rowlands

38. “Veganism is not about giving anything up or losing anything; it is about gaining the peace within yourself that comes from embracing nonviolence and refusing to participate in the exploitation of the vulnerable” - GaryLFrancione

39. “If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.” - GaryLFrancione

40. “We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.” - Gary L. Francione

41. “Never break a promise to an animal. They're like babies—they won't understand.” - Tamora Pierce

42. “Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man --spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort-- may become a dog's Master without consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog's God.” - Albert Payson Terhune

43. “At the same time we see the phenomenon of successful women adopting the standards of men with a vengeance. Will women's march to power ascendancy, won against all odds, mean that they too will choose to flaunt their preferences for red meat, animal skin, sport hunting, and even bullfighting? As women are swelling the ranks of biomedical science, many have adopted the practice of animal experimentation. Will animal exploitation become the ultimate symbol of equality with the white male?” - Maria Comninou

44. “People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

45. “Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.” - Tom Regan

46. “And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

47. “People leave imprints on our lives, shaping who we become in much the same way that a symbol is pressed into the page of a book to tell you who it comes from. Dogs, however, leave paw prints on our lives and our souls, which are as unique as fingerprints in every way.” - Ashly Lorenzana

48. “Some people say they love animals and yet harm them nonetheless; I'm glad those people don't love me.” - Marc Bekoff

49. “..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.” - Yann Martel

50. “Andy once clipped a magazine article about how black dogs are always the last to be adopted at shelters and, therefore, more likely to be put down. Which is totally Dog Racism, if you ask me.” - Stephanie Perkins

51. “One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.” - Douglas Tallamy

52. “But after dealing with Roy for a while I just wanted to get through the time I’d signed on for, to prove to myself that I couldn’t be beaten by a girly-faced, chicken-boned, racist cat.” - Peter Allison

53. “Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.” - Peter Allison

54. “Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

55. “I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.” - Derrick Jensen

56. “I sometimes think that animals are incapable of the kinds of cruelty that humans willingly inflict on each other.” - Belinda Jeffrey

57. “[T]he old stories of human relationships with animals can't be discounted. They are not primitive; they are primal. They reflect insights that came from considerable and elaborate systems of knowledge, intellectual traditions and ways of living that were tried, tested, and found true over many thousands of years and on all continents.But perhaps the truest story is with the animals themselves because we have found our exemplary ways through them, both in the older world and in the present time, both physically and spiritually. According to the traditions of the Seneca animal society, there were medicine animals in ancient times that entered into relationships with people. The animals themselves taught ceremonies that were to be performed in their names, saying they would provide help for humans if this relationship was kept. We have followed them, not only in the way the early European voyagers and prenavigators did, by following the migrations of whales in order to know their location, or by releasing birds from cages on their sailing vessels and following them towards land, but in ways more subtle and even more sustaining. In a discussion of the Wolf Dance of the Northwest, artists Bill Holm and William Reid said that 'It is often done by a woman or a group of women. The dance is supposed to come from the wolves. There are different versions of its origin and different songs, but the words say something like, 'Your name is widely known among the wolves. You are honored by the wolves.'In another recent account, a Northern Cheyenne ceremonialist said that after years spent recovering from removals and genocide, indigenous peoples are learning their lost songs back from the wolves who retained them during the grief-filled times, as thought the wolves, even though threatened in their own numbers, have had compassion for the people....It seems we have always found our way across unknown lands, physical and spiritual, with the assistance of the animals. Our cultures are shaped around them and we are judged by the ways in which we treat them. For us, the animals are understood to be our equals. They are still our teachers. They are our helpers and healers. They have been our guardians and we have been theirs. We have asked for, and sometimes been given, if we've lived well enough, carefully enough, their extraordinary powers of endurance and vision, which we have added to our own knowledge, powers and gifts when we are not strong enough for the tasks required of us. We have deep obligations to them. Without other animals, we are made less.(from her essay "First People")” - Linda Hogan

58. “Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.” - Terri Windling

59. “I don’t have to be logical. I’m a leopard. We’re considered wild animals, you know. (Spoken by Megan.)” - Amy Neftzger

60. “Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.” - Christopher Gérard

61. “Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.” - Chuck Palahniuk

62. “There are mystical, unbreakable bonds between all members of the natural world including humans and animals. Whether or not we remember or acknowledge this relatedness, it still exists.” - Elizabeth Eiler

63. “Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.” - Tim Ingold