Quotes about cat
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“Charm us, orator, till the lion look no larger than the cat.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

Source: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Line 112

“Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"A History of Eternity" in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
Context: I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.

Imagination, Cats, Thinking, Madness

“The mouse, even, has not been transmuted into the cat, nor the hen into the turkey, nor the duck into the goose, nor the hawk into the eagle, and still less the monkey into the man.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)
Context: Though the large runt pigeon, with its massive beak and its huge feet, differs from its blue and barred progenitor the rock, it is a pigeon still. Though the slender Italian greyhound has a strange contrast with the short-legged bull-dog, they are both dogs in their teeth and in their skull. The mouse, even, has not been transmuted into the cat, nor the hen into the turkey, nor the duck into the goose, nor the hawk into the eagle, and still less the monkey into the man.

Cats

“The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"The Greater Cats"
Kings Daughter (1929)
Context: The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.
They prowl the aromatic hill,
And mate as fiercely as they kill,
To roam, to live, to drink their fill;
But this beyond their wit know I:
Man loves a little, and for long shall die.

Star, Cats, Night

“Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Old Deuteronomy
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
Context: Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.

Cats, Time, Success

“When we were living in Colorado there was snowfall. Our cat — I’m a cat man — wanted to get out of the house so I opened a door for him but he wouldn’t leave. Just kept on crying. He’d seen snow before and I couldn’t understand it. I kept opening other doors for him and he still wouldn’t leave. Then Ginny said, «Oh, he’s looking for a door into summer». I threw up my hands, told her not to say another word, and wrote the novel «The Door Into Summer» in 13 days.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Cats, Understanding, Summer, Housing

“A cat in gloves catches no mice. ”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Cats

“Why are you trying to shoot that cat?”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

”Because—” I squeeze off another shot “—it’s possessed!”...
Mo turns and looks at me harshly. “That looked just like a perfectly ordinary cat to me. If you’ve—”
“It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!” I gabble. “The clue—he saw a laser dot and dodged—”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 16, “Reflex Decision” (p. 329; ellipsis represents a half-page elision)

Cats

“While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.”

George Monbiot (1963) English writer and political activist

"Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/04/livestock-farming-artificial-meat-industry-animals, The Guardian, 4 October 2017.

Dogs, Cats, Lovers, Suffering

“When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, bumping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Tunnel in the Sky

Source: Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Chapter 2, “The Fifth Way” (p. 42)

Making love, Cats

“When the man was disgraced and told to go away, he was allowed to ask all the animals whether any of them would come with him and share his fortunes and his life. There were only two who agreed to come entirely of their own accord, and they were the dog and the cat. And ever since then, those two have been jealous of each other, and each is for ever trying to make man choose which one he likes best. Every man prefers one or the other.”

Richard Adams book The Plague Dogs

The Plague Dogs (1977)

Life, Making love, Dogs, Cats

“Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs. A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn. She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Fecundity", p. 171
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)

Cats

“The cat didn’t answer, except possibly by not answering.”

Fredric Brown book The Mind Thing

Source: The Mind Thing (1961), Chapter 15 (p. 534)

Cats

“It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Death of Friends (1996), p.189

Cats, Thinking, Reading, Future

“From my reading of Gandhi I had learned how some people in India regard eating cow as unspeakably repulsive. I realized I felt the same way about cats and dogs: I could never eat them.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Were cows so different from cats and dogs that there were two moral standards, one that applies to cows, another that applies to cats and dogs? Were pigs so different? Were any of the animals I ate so different?
Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 2

People, Dogs, Way, Cats

“When beasts went together in companies, there was said to be a pride of lions; a lepe of leopards; an herd of harts, of bucks, and of all sorts of deer; a bevy of roes; a sloth of bears; a singular of boars; a sownder of wild swine; a dryft of tame swine; a route of wolves; a harras of horses; a rag of colts; a stud of mares; a pace of asses; a baren of mules, a team of oxen; a drove of kine; a flock of sheep; a tribe of goats; a sculk of foxes; a cete of badgers; a richess of martins; a fesynes of ferrets; a huske or a down of hares; a nest of rabbits; a clower of cats, and a kendel of young cats; a shrewdness of apes; and a labour of moles.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 22
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Collective nouns

Cats, Swine, Horse

“Didn’t you ever see a cat before?”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

“Of course I did,” said the boy. “Hundreds of them. But just because you’ve seen something, it doesn’t mean you stop looking. There’s always something you didn’t see before.”
Source: Time Cat (1963), Chapter 10 “Odranoel” (pp. 100-101)

Cats

“Manson arrived at the déjeuner given by the minister of Beaux Arts fantastically drunk—punctuated the ceremony with cat-calls and cock-a-doodle-doos, and finally staggered to his feet, hurled obscene insults at the company in general and the minister in particular, and precipitated himself on the ambassadress, Lady Phipps, some say with amorous intent others with lethal intent… the guests fled ices uneaten, coffee undrunk… I hope an example will be made, and that they will seize the opportunity for turning the sot out of the Tate, not because he is a sot, but because he has done nothing but harm to modern painting.”

James Bolivar Manson (1879–1945) British artist

Clive Bell, quoted in Frances Spalding, The Tate: A History (1998), pp. 62–70. Tate Gallery Publishing, London. ISBN 1854372319.

Hope, Art, Cats, Coffee

“Postal is a politically incorrect movie, and also a politically incorrect game. I think if you have a game where you can use a cat as a silencer, you cannot make this as a serious movie. So it must be a funny movie. It should be an absurd comedy…So you see there is a difference between doing something professional, and only talking about it. And all that people there in the Internet, bashing or whatever, they cannot tell a fucking story for 5 minutes.”

Uwe Boll (1965) German restaurateur and former filmmaker

Interview with Uwe Boll http://www.ubyssey.bc.ca/2007/11/23/worlds-worst-filmmaker/. 2000s

People, Making love, Game, Cats

“I think a significant number of people are not happy with the way things are; I’m not, and I’ve done alright out of this system—I’ve got a big house, a nice cat, and when I write books, they’re immediately put on the school curriculum. So this system has not been bad to me. I’ve been given everything that I wanted. The problem is, I didn’t really want it, that desire was put there. Who put it there? And why?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Bad luck, Happiness, People, Books

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Letter https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860 Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

God, Cats

“Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you’re doing is thinking about what you’re going to be doing to go on doing what you’re doing. Worrying about whether you’ve got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you’re getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It’s being alive, but it’s hardly living.”

Cory Doctorow (1971) Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 114

Age, Food, Cats, Thinking

“Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Old Deuteronomy
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Cats, Time, Success

“I tell ya, man, your cat is officially out of control. He really gives new meaning to the term tempest in a teapot.”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

Daily strip for July 19, 2002
Joe Doman

Cats

“Ra ra Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra ra Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on”

Boney M.

Boney M., in their 1978 song "Rasputin"

Love, Making love, Cats, Lovers

“It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

1.10 On the Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#feline The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Beauty, Cats

“Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, "rewilding", etc. So the question is not whether humans should "interfere", but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

" The Antispeciesist Revolution https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/pearce20130726", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013

Cats, Question, Nature

“…I also wanted to make sure no one tried to make her “save the cat.””

Gillian Flynn (1971) American author and critic

To me, Camille is an inherently kind person despite everything that’s happened to her. And you see that when you walk through the day with Camille. You see how she treats people. But she’s not running around saving babies and kittens just so the audience can be sure she’s a good person. On how she hoped the television version of Sharp Objects would stay true to the character of Camille in “Gillian Flynn Isn’t Going to Write the Kind of Women You Want” https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/gillian-flynn-isnt-going-to-write-the-kind-of-women-you-want in Vanity Fair (2018 Jun 28)

Making love, Cats

“I pretended I was Cat Stevens. I started out with very Cat Stevensy chords, very abrupt. I was so stuck in the moment of being fearful so as a lesson to myself I said: ‘but we can never know about the days to come’. I didn’t know when the door-bell was going to ring. I liked that. It was all of a sudden a quarter to eight and I had written the whole song.”

Carly Simon (1943) American singer-songwriter, musician and author

On her song “Anticipation” in “Carly Simon explains ‘Anticipation’ was about Cat Stevens” http://www.music-news.com/news/Underground/101225/Carly-Simon-explains-Anticipation-was-about-Cat-Stevens in Music-News.com (31 Oct 2016)

Fear, Cats

“Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: ‘Kill a cat and save a bird?”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

Source: At a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965. https://www.womanandhome.com/life/news-entertainment/prince-philip-quotes-63435/

Men, Cats, Bird

“Cats — by day the most docile of God's creatures, everyone of them in the night enlisting under the devil's banner — took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased.”

William Henry Davies book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), Ch. XXV

God, Cats, Night

“I have no faith in cats: they are a cold-blooded race; they are the politicians among domestic animals; they care little who is master, or what are the over-turnings, so their pickings are secure; and what are their midnight caucuses but primary meetings?”

Donald Grant Mitchell (1822–1908) American writer

Source: My Farm of Edgewood (1863), P. 49

Faith, Cats, Animals

“If I can't powerwash a cat, I'm out.”

Markiplier (1989) American YouTuber and Internet personality

Video game commentary, PowerWash Simulator (2021) Source: PowerWash Simulator, Markiplier, wikipedia:Markiplier, July 6, 2021, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PpXG_8zMeI&list=PL3tRBEVW0hiAa1r0tG-M8lDKYzZE4DLo6,

Cats

“Trying to win an argument with an irrational person is like trying to teach a cat to snorkel by providing written instructions. No matter how clear your instructions, it won't work. Your best strategy is to reduce the time you spend in that sort of situation.”

Scott Adams book The Joy of Work

Source: Books, The Joy of Work (1998)

Cats, Time, Personality

“I make the pussy purr with
The stroke of my hand
They know they gettin' it from me
They know just where to go
When they need their lovin man
They know I do it for free They give me cat scratch fever”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Song lyrics
Source: "Cat Scratch Fever" on Cat Scratch Fever (1977)

Cats

“the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die.
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it's a lousy fix”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories (1996), Lines from "So now?" - p.402 (circa 1994. He died in March 1994, aged 73.)

Cats, Sleep, Waiting

“Once upon a time I drank a little wine,
was as happy as could be, happy as could be,
Now I'm just like a cat on a hot tin roof,
Baby, what do you think you're doing to me?
Told you once before
and I won't tell you no more,
so get down, get down, get down
You're a bad dog, Baby
but I still want you around, around
I still want you around
Hey hey hey”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"Get Down" (song) Song lyrics Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Get Down" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXl5P2xO9-o (song on YouTube) Source: (+ Duet with Lulu. On YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlqoiBV6ETs

Happiness, Dogs, Cats, Thinking

“It would be very unlucky for cats if people in a body should discover how much more jolly it was to be out in the warm golden mist of moonlight, when all was so fresh and sweet, than tucked up in their heated bedrooms under the low ceiling that shuts out the stars.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

Source: Don John (1881), Ch. 9, p. 108.

People, Star, Cats

“Having many cats is good. If you feel bad, you look at the cats and you feel better, because they know that everything is just the way it is. You don't have to be nervous about anything. And they know it. They are saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you will live. If you have a hundred cats, you will live ten times longer than if you have ten. One day, this will be known and people will have thousands of cats.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

People, Way, Feeling, Cats

Quotes about cat page 8

Quotes about cat
page 8