“If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author
Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 1
“He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.”
Space (1912)
Context: Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.
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John Buchan145
British politician 1875–1940Related quotes
“If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Source: Notebook
“No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities
Bk. II, Ch. 4
Elective Affinities (1809)
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.
Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves
Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 3 “Blood and Breath and Water” section 1 (p. 146)
“I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not”
Robert A. Heinlein book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
Source: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist
Kotaro Suzumura, An interview with Paul Samuelson: welfare economics,“old” and “new”, and social choice theory (2005)
New millennium