Quotes about creature
page 8

“Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?”

Walker Percy book The Message in the Bottle

The Message in the Bottle (1975)

Nature, Animals

“Therefore, it is you, the giver of life and being, who seem to be sought in the different rites by different ways and are named with different names, because as you are you remain unknown and ineffable to all. For you who are infinite power are none of those things which you have created, nor can a creature grasp the concept of your infinity since there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite. But you, almighty God, who are invisible to every mind, are able to show yourself as visible to whom you will and in the way in which you can be grasped. Therefore, do not hide yourself any longer, O Lord; be merciful and show your face, and all peoples will be saved who are no longer able to forsake the source of life and its sweetness when they have had even a little foretaste of them. For no one withdraws from you unless he does not know you.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Life, God, People, Way

“On a nygth, as this creatur lay in hir bedde wyth hir husbond, sche herd a sownd of melodye so swet and delectable, hir thowt, as sche had ben in paradyse. And therwyth sche styrt owt of hir bedde and seyd, "Alas, that evyr I dede synne, it is ful mery in hevyn."”

Margery Kempe (1373) English saint

On a night, as this creature lay in her bed with her husband, she heard a sound of melody so sweet and delectable, that she thought she had been in Paradise, and therewith she started out of her bed and said: "Alas, that ever I did sin! It is full merry in Heaven."
Source: The Book of Margery Kempe, Ch. 3; p. 5.

“The most powerful figure in French politics after the retirement of Clemenceau was ex-President Poincaré. He disliked the Treaty [of Versailles] intensely. For several years after the withdrawal of Clemenceau, the policy of France was dominated by this rather sinister little man. He represented the vindictive and arrogant mood of the governing classes in France immediately after her terrible sacrifices and her astounding victory. He directly and indirectly governed France for years. All the Premiers who followed after Clemenceau feared Poincaré. Millerand was his creature. Briand, who was all for the League and a policy of appeasement, was thwarted at every turn by the intrigues of Poincaré. Under his influence, which continued for years after his death, the League became not an instrument of peace and goodwill amongst all men, including Germans; it was converted into an organisation for establishing on a permanent footing the military and thereby the diplomatic supremacy of France. That policy completely discredited the League as a body whose decisions on disputes between nations might be trusted to be as impartial as those of any ordinary tribunal in any civilised country. The obligations entered into by the Allies as to disarmament were not fulfilled. British Ministers put up no fight against the betrayal of the League and the pledges as to disarmament. Hence the Nazi Revolution, which has for the time—maybe for a long time—destroyed the hopes of a new era of peaceful co-operation amongst free nations.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties. Volume II (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 1410.
About

Death, Men, Fear, Peace

“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Celui qui ignore à quel point la fortune variable et la nécessité tiennent toute âme humaine sous leur dépendance ne peut pas regarder comme des semblables ni aimer comme soi-même ceux que le hasard a séparés de lui par un abîme. La diversité des contraintes qui pèsent sur les hommes fait naître l'illusion qu'il y a parmi eux des espèces distinctes qui ne peuvent communiquer.
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 192

Love, Communication, Chance

“And this divine light is granted in the simple being of the spirit, where the spirit receives the brightness –which is God Himself- above all gifts and above all creaturely activity, in the empty void of the spirit in which it has lost itself through enjoyable love and receives the brightness of God without intermediary. And without cease, it becomes the very brightness which it receives.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love, God, Light

“My young friend who was taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be persuaded to forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But it is a belief limited not only to the more rigid sects. I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God's loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love… Origen held this belief and was ultimately pronounced a heretic. Gregory of Nyssa, affirming the same loving God, was made a saint. Some people feel it to be heresy because it appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God. But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride. If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love — and of our own free will.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love, God, People, World

“I believe synthetic biology forces society into the chaos of ethics. And, I believe that every connotation of "chaos" applies to the ethics of synthetic biology. Researchers must decide if a particular endeavor is ethical because, of course, mistakes can result due to the unpredictability of these very complex systems. I also believe that the original Greek and the Genesis, Chapter 1, understanding of formlessness applies, since scientists are trying to move to the simplest creatures possible, so-called "chassis bacteria", onto which they can add desirable traits at their choosing. Finally, I believe that the mathematical connotation of chaos applies, since even the most simple living creature is a dynamical system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. I sometimes wonder about the extent to which those most intimately involved and those strongly advocating synthetic biology think about this.”

Daniel Alan Vallero (1953) American scientist

Class notes from Vallero's optimization course at Duke University. 2017.

Mathematics, Understanding, Thinking

“Lay your sleeping head, my love
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie:
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Lay your sleeping head, my love (1937), lines 1–2, written January 1937; also known as Lullaby.

Love, Children, Lie, Beauty

“The animals are our brothers; another nation living on earth, growing up beside us. They are not lesser beings; they are selves in different forms. Some of them have flippers, some wings for motivation; some have two propelling legs, some have four; we have only two. Some have thumbs, some have claws. We have manufactured claws and worse. We have no rights over these creatures; yet we exploit and imprison them. They should run wild and be on their own but we have corrupted them, enslaved them and modified their behavior and opportunities. Some of them like it, some don't. We have made friends of some and slaves of others.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992), p. 162

Behavior, Motivation, Animals

“Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

Pauvres diables!... D'où sortent ces malheureux êtres ?... À quel Montfaucon vont-ils mourir ?... Que leur octroie la munificence municipale pour nettoyer (ou salir) ainsi le pavé de Paris ?... À quel âge les envoie-t-on à l'équarrissage ?... Que fait-on de leurs os ? (leur peau n'est bonne à rien.)
Les Grotesques de la Musique (Paris: A. Bourdilliat, 1859) p. 89; Alastair Bruce (trans.) The Musical Madhouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003) pp. 54-56.
Of critics

Age

“A number of frail girls… prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

World, Girl

“The tendency in the media is to portray everyone in the film industry as sex-starved creatures. Please spare us.”

Madhuri Dixit (1967) Indian actress

Quote, When personality comes first.....

Sex

“The classic rationalists did not consider the members of an organization as human beings, but just as cogs in the machine. For them, workers were only hands. The human relations approach has shown how incomplete this rationale was. It has also made it possible to consider workers as creatures of feeling, who are moved by the impact of the so-called rational decisions taken above then, and will react to them. A human being, however, does not have only a hand a heart. He also had a head, which means that he is free to play his own game.”

Michel Crozier (1922–2013) French sociologist

Source: The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, 1954, p. 149.

Feeling, Game, Decision, Heart

“Many Christians who agree that harming a dog or cat is wrong think nothing of harming cows, pigs, chickens, fish and other creatures. We need to understand that if we’re eating meat, we are paying people to be cruel to animals. For the simple reasons that all animals are creatures beloved by God and that God created them with a capacity for pain and suffering, we should adopt a vegetarian diet.”

John Dear (1959) Catholic priest from the United States

Christianity and Vegetarianism (1990)

God, Pain, People, Dogs

“But as I listened to him, I felt a touch of coldness inside of me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 29

“With Thee in shady solitudes I walk,
With Thee in busy, crowded cities talk;
In every creature own Thy forming power,
In each event Thy providence adore.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 433.

Business, Solitude

“The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and… they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this became cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

"GRRM Interview Part 2: Fantasy and History", interview with TIME Entertainment http://entertainment.time.com/2011/04/18/grrm-interview-part-2-fantasy-and-history/ (18 April 2011)

People, Thinking, Decision, Evil

“Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Source: Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior (1970), p. 13

God, Hate

“The revelation of the Divine Reality hath everlastingly been identical with its concealment and its concealment identical with its revelation. That which is intended by ‘Revelation of God’ is the Tree of divine Truth that betokeneth none but Him, and it is this divine Tree that hath raised and will raise up Messengers, and hath revealed and will ever reveal Scriptures. From eternity unto eternity this Tree of divine Truth hath served and will ever serve as the throne of the revelation and concealment of God among His creatures, and in every age is made manifest through whomsoever He pleaseth. At the time of the revelation of the Qur’án He asserted His transcendent power through the advent of Muḥammad, and on the occasion of the revelation of the Bayán He demonstrated His sovereign might through the appearance of the Point of the Bayán, and when He Whom God shall make manifest will shine forth, it will be through Him that He will vindicate the truth of His Faith, as He pleaseth, with whatsoever He pleaseth and for whatsoever He pleaseth. He is with all things, yet nothing is with Him. He is not within a thing nor above it nor beside it. Any reference to His being established upon the throne implieth that the Exponent of His Revelation is established upon the seat of transcendent authority…
He hath everlastingly existed and will everlastingly continue to exist. He hath been and will ever remain inscrutable unto all men, inasmuch as all else besides Him have been and shall ever be created through the potency of His command. He is exalted above every mention or praise and is sanctified beyond every word of commendation or every comparison. No created thing comprehendeth Him, while He in truth comprehendeth all things. Even when it is said ‘no created thing comprehendeth Him’, this refers to the Mirror of His Revelation, that is Him Whom God shall make manifest. Indeed too high and exalted is He for anyone to allude unto Him.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

II, 8
The Persian Bayán

Men, God, Truth, Age

“I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she’s the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (p. 241)
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Life, Death, Money, Smile

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Way

“The art of motion has always intrigued me. How a body - when it throws its weight from side to side and sits down - actually sits down. What muscles interact to bring that simple movement to its conclusion. Movement is a fascinating process and each creature I have made and animated has had its own character according to its physiognomy.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 7

Art, Animals

“Though it be so that this deed be truly taken for the general Man, yet it excludeth not the special. For what our good Lord will do by His poor creatures, it is now unknown to me.
But this deed and that other aforesaid, they are not both one but two sundry. This deed shall be done sooner (and that shall be as we come to Heaven), and to whom our Lord giveth it, it may be known here in part. But that Great Deed aforesaid shall neither be known in Heaven nor earth till it is done.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Parting

“Which do you think came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before or after the vessels evolved? If it was before, what was it that carried blood to the heart, if there were no vessels? Did the heart beat before the blood evolved? Why was it beating if there was no blood to pump? If it wasn’t beating, why did it start when it had no awareness of blood? If the blood vessels evolved before there was blood, why did they evolve if there was no such thing as blood? And if the blood evolved before the heart evolved, what was it that caused it to circulate around the body? The marvelous human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) consists of so many amazingly interdependent parts: a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to protect it all), etc. The intricate codependence of just the respiratory system and the circulatory system—not to mention all the other bodily systems—is difficult to explain.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Bird, Thinking, Fish, Heart

“There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame. By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Babies".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Family, Water, Baby

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law, Nature, Personality

“Anarchism is the purity of rebellion. A pig who struggles wildly and rends the air with his cries while he is held to be slaughtered, and a baby who kicks and screams when, wanting warmth and his mother's breast, he is made to wait in the cold—these are two samples of natural rebellion. Natural rebellion always inspires either deep sympathy and identification with the rebelling creature, or a stiffening of the heart and an activation of aggressive-defensive mechanisms to silence an accusing truth. This truth is that each living being is an end in itself; that nothing gives a being the right to make another a mere instrument of his purposes.”

Giovanni Baldelli (1914–1986) Anarchist theorist

Source: Social Anarchism (1971), p. 1

Truth, Nature, Silence, Waiting

“Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

People, World, Faith, Religion

“Man alone consumes more flesh than all the other animals together devour; he is, then, the greatest destroyer; and this more from custom than necessity. Instead of using with moderation the blessings which are offered him, instead of disposing of them with equity, instead of increasing them in proportion as he destroys, the rich man places all his glory in consuming, in one day, at his table, as much as would be necessary to support many families: he equally abuses both animals and his fellow-creatures, some of whom remain starving and languishing in misery, and labour only to satisfy his immoderate appetite, and more insatiable vanity, and who, by destroying others through wantonness, destroys himself by excess. Nevertheless, man, like some other animals, might live on vegetables.”

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon book Histoire Naturelle

Histoire Naturelle (1753), trans. J. S. Barr, London: H. D. Symonds, 1797, vol. V, pp. 209 https://books.google.it/books?id=9QpTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA209-210.

Family, Support, Animals

“I started eating vegan purely for health/athletic reasons originally. But as the years have gone by, I care very much about trying to cause as little harm to other creatures as possible. I really love animals and respect them very much, and I don’t want to see them hurt or forced into unnatural lives. I’m not so much out to change the world, as to change myself, but I would love to see all the people taking care of all living creatures, humans included. Wouldn’t that be something? With being vegan and avoiding animal products of any kind, my policy has always been to just do the best I can. No one’s perfect, but we can’t let that stop us from trying to be better, right?”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

"Talking About Sports Nutrition" http://stephdavis.co/blog/talking-about-sports-nutrition/, on her blog (April 10, 2008).

Love, People, Health, World

“Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, “We have a genius for what we like.” Genius, man’s superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: What is Philosophy? (1964), pp. 16-17

Happiness, Pleasure, Truth

“Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes seen as simple, primitive creatures. That's a long way from the truth. The fact that they are solar-powered means that their bodies require only 10% of the energy that mammals of a similar size require. At a time when we ourselves are becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which we get our energy from the environment and the wasteful way in which we use it, maybe there are things that we can learn from "life in cold blood."”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life in Cold Blood (2008)

Life, Truth, Way, Learning

“…but also perhaps you sometimes delight in consideration of the most perfectly constructed of all creatures, and take delight in considering the temporary lodging and instrument of the immortal soul, a dwelling that in many respects corresponds to the universe and for that reason was called the little universe [microcosmos] by the ancients.”

Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) early anatomist

De fabrica, quoted in O'Malley 1964, p. 324

Soul, Universe

“The cool thing about my character was that it’s not that digital. I get to put hours of prosthetic makeup on and see a different creature altogether. I’ve seen how he looks and it’s really cool.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

September 10, 2008 http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2008/09/10/gi-joe-star-joseph-gordon-levitt-undergoes-transformation-for-cobra-commander-role/, on the Cobra Commander role

“Silence,” it has been said by one writer, “is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 23

Silence

“With very slight straining of equivalents, Thomas might now be written thus:—

By the term God, is meant a Prime Mover which supplies all energy to the universe, and acts directly on man as well as on all other creatures, moving him as a mechanical motor might do; but man, being specially provided with an organism more complex than the organisms of other creatures, enjoys an exceptional capacity for reflex action,— a power of reflexion,— which enables him within certain limits to choose between paths; and this singular capacity is called free choice or free-will. Of course, the reflexion is not choice, and though a man's mind reflected as perfectly as the facets of a lighthouse lantern, it would never reach a choice without an energy which impels it to act. [...]

The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of dynamics as modern as the dynamo.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God, Universe

“We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Life, God, Way, Nature

“[When asked if he has a favorite woodland creature]”

Noel Fielding (1973) British comedian and actor

HermAphroditeZine, Autumn 1999

“A woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly. She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

The Education of Women (1719)

Love, Peace, Angels, Way

““I’ve been on my own before, Mather.” And I hadn’t been happy a moment. But happiness is a fleeting creature. It’s no birthright. Not anything I expect but something I accept when I tumble into it. Meantime, power will do nicely.”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 14 (p. 276)

Happiness

“How could we bear, nursed as we have been in a free atmosphere, to be gagged and muzzled; to have spies, eavesdroppers and delators at every corner; to have even private conversations caught up and used against us by the Secret Police and all their agents and creatures; to be arrested and interned without trial; or to be tried by political or Party courts for crimes hitherto unknown to civil law. How could we bear to be treated like schoolboys when we are grown-up men; to be turned out on parade by tens of thousands to march and cheer for this slogan or for that; to see philosophers, teachers and authors bullied and toiled to death in concentration camps; to be forced every hour to conceal the natural workings of the human intellect and the pulsations of the human heart? Why, I say that rather than submit to such oppression, there is no length we would not go to.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris (24 September 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 788
The 1930s

Death, Men, Secret, Law

“He had seen fire, but only when Ara, the lightning, had destroyed some great tree. That any creature of the jungle could produce the red-and-yellow fangs which devoured wood and left nothing but fine dust surprised Tarzan greatly, and why the black warrior had ruined his delicious repast by plunging it into the blighting heat was quite beyond him. Possibly Ara was a friend with whom the Archer was sharing his food.
But, be that as it may, Tarzan would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner, so he gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Food, Tree

“Here I saw a part of the compassion of our Lady, Saint Mary: for Christ and she were so oned in love that the greatness of her loving was cause of the greatness of her pain. For in this I saw a Substance of Nature’s Love, continued by Grace, that creatures have to Him: which Kind Love was most fully shewed in His sweet Mother, and overpassing; for so much as she loved Him more than all other, her pains passed all other. For ever the higher, the mightier, the sweeter that the love be, the more sorrow it is to the lover to see that body in pain that is loved.
And all His disciples and all His true lovers suffered pains more than their own bodily dying. For I am sure by mine own feeling that the least of them loved Him so far above himself that it passeth all that I can say.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 18

Love, Pain, Feeling, Lovers

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Dracula, having found Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood in his house
Dracula (1897)

Love, Girl, Revenge, Thinking

“It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."
"I am pleased that you were not wholly bored," Martin said. "Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?”

Roger Zelazny book Unicorn Variation

"Oh, that," Tlingel replied.
Unicorn Variation (1982)

Game

“My sin shall not hinder His Goodness working.... A deed shall be done — as we come to Heaven — and it may be known here in part; — though it be truly taken for the general Man, yet it excludeth not the special. For what our good Lord will do by His poor creatures, it is now unknown to me”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Parting

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

Death, Hunger, Age, World

“As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Innovations
Essays (1625)

Birth, Time

“If thus you would deign to do this, the sword and the bilious spite of hatred and all evil sufferings will cease; and all will know that there is only one religion in the variety of rites. But if perhaps this difference of rites cannot be removed or if it is not expedient to do so in order that the diversity may contribute to devotion, as when any region expends a more attentive effort in performing its ceremonies as if they would become the more pleasing to you, the King: at any rate, just as you are one, there should be one religion and one veneration of worship. Therefore, may you be appeased, O Lord, for your wrath is compassion and your justice mercy: spare your weak creature. So we, your deputies, whom you have placed as keepers for your people and whom you see here, humbly beseech your majesty by every means of entreaty possible to us”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

People, Religion, Justice, Effort

“First and foremost, I'm a feminist. And basically that stems from a strong belief that all people and creatures deserve equal opportunity, rights and respect.”

Kathy Najimy (1957) American actress

Interview by Marianne Schnall http://kathynajimy.com/inteview.htm

People, Strong

“There is a fraternity more comprehensive and more universal than the “brotherhood of man.” Let us think and speak of the “brotherhood of being.” Let us see in the ox a patient, industrious kinsman, worthy of respect. Let us see and recognize in the sheep a meek and docile fellow creature appealing to us for protection and admiration.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, pp. 189-190

Thinking, Universe

“He in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Jonathan Wild (1743, rev. 1754), Book III, ch. 7

Time

“Watson's childlike vision makes them seem like the creatures of a Wonderland, all at a strange contentious noisy tea-party which made room for him because for people like him, at this particular kind of party, there is always room.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Lucky Jim, 1968

People, Tea

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Life, Hostility, Happiness, World

“As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker.”

Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) American theologian

Source: Halakhic Man (1983), pp. 83-84

World, Law

“Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother’s womb” all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.”
O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis foelicitatem! Cui datum id habere quod optat, id esse quod velit. Bruta simul atque nascuntur id secum afferunt (ut ait Lucilius) e bulga matris quod possessura sunt. Supremi spiritus aut ab initio aut paulo mox id fuerunt, quod sunt futuri in perpetuas aeternitates. Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia planta fiet, si sensualia obrutescet, si rationalia caeleste evadet animal, si intellectualia angelus erit et Dei filius. Et si nulla creaturarum sorte contentus in unitatis centrum suae se receperit, unus cum Deo spiritus factus, in solitaria Patris caligine qui est super omnia constitutus omnibus antestabit.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola book Oration on the Dignity of Man

6. 24-31; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Alternate translation of 6. 28-29 (Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater. Quae quisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo.):
The Father infused in man, at birth, every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life. These seeds will grow and bear their fruit in each man who will cultivate them.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Life, God, Angels, Birth

“I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be — intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next, — those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

3 January 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Truth, Books, World, Faith

“But no one can eat the flesh of a slaughtered animal without having used the hand of a man as slaughterer. Suppose that we had to kill for ourselves the creatures whose bodies we would fain have upon our table, is there one woman in a hundred who would go to the slaughterhouse to slay the bullock, the calf, the sheep or the pig?”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Humanimal http://books.google.co.in/books?id=KwmMAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA140, p. 140

Animals

“Praise Him whose limit cannot be found.
They who practise truth and perform service shall obtain their reward.
He who knoweth divine knowledge is the learned pandit.
He who knoweth the one God in all creatures would never say 'I exist by myself '.
When the hair groweth white, it shineth without soap.
King Death's hunters follow him who is bound by the chain of mammon.
The Creator, Lord of the world, giveth sustenance to His slaves.
All the world is bound in His bonds; no other authority prevaileth.
He who hath renounced the singing of God's word, is arrogant in his language.
He who fashioned vessels made kilns in which He put them and burnt them.
The servant who performeth the Guru's work, who remaineth obedient to His commands,
Who deemeth bad and good as the same, shall in this way be absorbed in Him.
He who made the four Veds, the four mines, and the four ages
Hath been in every age a Jogi, a worldly man, or a learned pandit.”

Nanak (1469–1539) Founder of Sikhism

Life Of Guru Nanak: Chapter I

Death, God, Truth, Age

“We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to make all people understand that animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves… The basis for peace is respecting all creatures… That's the basis, the beginning for peace. …We know we cannot defend or be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them - exploiting them in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

Accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from In Defense of Animals in 1992.

Love, People, Peace, Food

“I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy… Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich's surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Response to a letter from an unemployed professional musician (5 April 1933), p. 115
The editors precede this passage thus, "Early in 1933, Einstein received a letter from a professional musician who presumably lived in Munich. The musician was evidently troubled and despondent, and out of a job, yet at the same time, he must have been something of a kindred spirit. His letter is lost, all that survives being Einstein's reply....Note the careful anonymity of the first sentence — the recipient would be safer that way:" Albert Einstein: The Human Side concludes with this passage, followed by the original passages in German.
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Beauty, Nature, Thinking, Time

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

Death, Hate, People, Feeling

“Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice. And what a practice. The violation of an individual woman is the metaphor for man's forcing himself on whole nations […], on nonhuman creatures […], and on the planet itself […].”

Robin Morgan (1941) American feminist writer

reflected even in our language—carving up "virgin territory," with strip mining often referred to as a "rape of the land" "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" (1974) in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist.

“I intend to make this day forward the first day of the rest of my life. We can change our lives. You say, 'Well, what's wrong with your life, Michael?' Well, it's not that there's anything wrong with my life, but it's not what I want it to be. I don't feel that I'm inspiring people in the way I want to inspire them. You see, you can inspire through hate; you can inspire through love, hope, humor – the positives. I look at the history of the world, and I look at the world today, and I realize that if we don't inspire each other through positive attributes – love, hope and humor – we're gonna descend into the barbarism of the Left and the barbarism of ISIS. You like me to be hard, you like me to be tough, you like me to give you the breaking news, you like me to be cynical, you like me to analytical, you like me to give you stuff that you don't hear anywhere else – I get that. But there's a limit to that. There's a lot of area beyond all that.I think of Christmas. Christianity is the religion of peace. Christianity is the true religion of peace. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' These are messages that come from Christianity. What can you do in an age of deceit and lies and terror? You can go to church again. However un-needing you think you really are, you know in your heart that there's something missing in you. You know that you crave something greater. Because the human being is not a dog. We are unique creatures. And we need something different than the bear, the dog, the snake and the eagle. What is that thing that we need? It's that 'thing' called God.The media has promulgated the idea, and promoted the idea, that we only need food and fornication. And so when people are empty that's what they seek. And when they are really empty, what happens? They become drug addicts. They start with marijuana, they end up with heroin, crack, you name it. As God has been driven out of America, drugs have entered America. What does an empty soul look to do? An empty soul looks to fill itself. Just as an empty vessel needs to be filled with a liquid to be complete, an empty human being needs to fill itself to be complete. And how does it fill itself? I know, again, many of you will laugh because you're cynical; it's through those things I'm talking about – inspiration. Do you think a musician can play one day without inspiration from somewhere? The greatest artists in the history of the world were not drug-addicts. They were usually God-addicts. Look at the greatest art in history, you'll find most of them were super religious people, who literally saw God in their living room, and they took the power of God and that was transmitted through the paintbrush, or through that piece of marble. How could a man like Rodin take a piece of inert stone, and inside that stone see the essence of the human form, and sculpt from that block of inert stone, a marble, the portrait of a human being that looks so real – a hundred years later I go and look at them in the museum, and literally inside that carved eye I can see the person; how is that possible? How? It's a different show than I've ever done in my 21 years, because each day to me – I must tell you – I see as my last day, my last day on Earth.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015

Love, Life, God, Hate

“The creature displayed the qualities reminiscent of both coelenterate and echinoderm. A terrene nudibranch? A mollusc deprived of its shell? More importantly, was the creature edible?”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Chapter 4, "The Sorcerer Pharesm"

“There are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”
Crescunt animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi, et per aera intus in corpus per os ac nares perveniunt atque efficiunt difficilis morbos.

Marcus Terentius Varro (-116–-27 BC) ancient latin scholar

Marcus Porcius Cato on Agriculture : Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture. W.D. Hooper & H.B. Ash. (translation). Harvard University Press, 1993. Bk. 1, ch. 12
De Re Rustica

Disease

“Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
Nor with a Stone —
A Whip so small you could not see it
I've known

To lash the Magic Creature
Till it fell,
Yet that Whip's Name
Too noble then to tell.

Magnanimous as Bird
By Boy descried —
Singing unto the Stone
Of which it died —

Shame need not crouch
In such an Earth as Ours —
Shame — stand erect —
The Universe is yours.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

1304: Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

Boy, Bird, Universe, Singing

“Because truths of different kinds exhibit the characteristics of incommensurability (their difference is such that they cannot be measured by a single standard or reduced to members of one series) and incompossibility (their difference is such that they cannot co-exist within the same system), such openness introduces both multiplicity and contradiction, and the creature in question stands “divided against himself.””

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 9-10

Truth, Question

“The faculty of moral will, developed in the child, is a new element of his nature. It is a new power brought upon the scene, and a ruling power, delegated from Heaven. Never was a human being sunk so low that he had not, by God's gift, the power to rise. Because God commands him to rise. it is certain that he ran rise. Every man has the power, and should use it, to make all situations, trials, and temptations instruments to promote his virtue and happiness; and is so far from being the creature of circumstances, 'that he creates and controls them, making them to be all that they are, of evil or of good, to him as a moral being.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 192

God, Happiness, Nature, Evil

“A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

God, Peace

“With these dramatic words, Kant alludes to the two great problems and accomplishments of his philosophical career. On the one hand, he wants to know how we who as creatures are a mere part of nature can discover how all of nature … does and even must work. On the other hand, he wants to display the unconditional value that we have as rational rather than merely natural beings, … and that we are always free to act in accordance with and indeed for the sake of this principle, thus free to realize the unconditional value for which we unlike anything else in nature have the potential.”

Paul Guyer (1948) American philosopher

Kant (2006; 2014), Introduction

Nature, Problem, Parting

“But in such perfect Animals as Sheep and Oxen, in whom the Heart, the Brain and Nerves differ so little from ours, and in whom the Separation of the Spirits from the Blood, the Organs of Sense, and consequently Feeling it self, are the same as they are in Human Creatures; I can't imagine how a Man not hardened in Blood and Massacre, is able to see a violent Death, and the Pangs of it, without Concern. In answer to this, most People will think it sufficient to say, that all Things being allow'd to be made for the Service of Man, there can be no Cruelty in putting Creatures to the use they were design'd for; but I have heard Men make this Reply, whilst their Nature within them has reproach'd them with the Falshood of the Assertion.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

Remark P, pp. 187-8
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Death, Men, People, Feeling

“Far up above, aliens hover
Making home movies for the folks back home
Of all these weird creatures that lock up their spirits
Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Subterranean Homesick Alien"
Lyrics, OK Computer (1997)

Secret, Home

“When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.”

John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 4

Life, Men, Happiness, Fear

“And this is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from heaven to earth, by which every creature is annexed, and depends on his Creator.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 1, member 2, subsection 1.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III

Dependency

“No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax.

Love

“I think that when friendship and perception of kinship ruled everything, no one killed any creature, because people thought the other animals were related to them.”

Porphyry (philosopher) (233–301) Neoplatonist philosopher

2, 22, 1
On Abstinence from Killing Animals

Friendship, People, Thinking, Animals

“The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, … Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. … The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 159

Life, Beauty, Passion, Heart

“Drink is in itself a good creature of God, but the abuse of drink is from Satan.”

Increase Mather (1639–1723) Puritan minister, academic, activist

As quoted in The Truth About Alcohol (2005) by Barry Youngerman and Mark J. Kittleson, p. 129.

God, Drink

“Our courteous Lord willeth that we should be as homely with Him as heart may think or soul may desire. But beware that we take not so recklessly this homeliness as to leave courtesy. For our Lord Himself is sovereign homeliness, and as homely as He is, so courteous He is: for He is very courteous. And the blessed creatures that shall be in heaven with Him without end, He will have them like to Himself in all things. And to be like our Lord perfectly, it is our very salvation and our full bliss.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 77

Home, Soul, Thinking, Heart

“A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)

God, Children, People, Understanding

“So, many corporations will be “killed,” according to Adbusters’ excellent suggestion. Perhaps we should use the word “cull,” like people do when they want to kill something cute. “Are you killing that badger?” “No, sir, culling it.” “When you’ve finished ‘culling’ it, will it be dead?” “A bit, yes.” “So explain the difference between killing and culling?” “Well, it’s a ‘u’—and a sort of tuneful sense that the creature is being gently lulled to death rather than killed with a hammer.” “And what’s the hammer you’re holding for?” “Culling.” So maybe we should cull some corporations. Once we’ve culled them, their resources and materials can be returned to communities to run themselves. Outlined here is a suggestion for how a corporation could be structured more fairly.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Death, People, Communication, Sense

“The focus of all life is its economy, the mode through which every living creature produces its material existence. I know no other criterion for the evaluation of social life except that of social economy. In society, just like anywhere else, the mode of production is the focus around which revolve all the modes of life: in the historical life of conscious beings, it is also the focus of all modes of consciousness.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess to Herzen, March 1850, Briefwechsel p. 253
Hess' Diary

Life

“Thirdly, he must have lost himself in a waylessness and in a darkness in which all contemplatives wander around in enjoyment and can no longer find themselves in a creaturely way. In the abyss of this darkness in which the loving spirit has died to itself, there begin the revelation of God and eternal life. For in this darkness there shines and is born an incomprehensible light which is the Son of God, in whom one contemplates eternal life. And in this light one becomes seeing.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love, Life, God, Way

“I've seen how violently animals raised for food are treated, and I don't want to support that. … The fact that the meat on my plate was once a living, breathing creature became something I could no longer ignore or justify as food. … As someone who felt they were a confirmed meat-eater, I guess ultimately if I can do it, then anyone can, you know―it’s a really easy choice to make. And it’s a humane choice to make.”

Owain Yeoman (1978) British actor

“Owain Yeoman’s ‘Veggie Testimonials’,” in PETA.org (12 May 2009) https://www.peta.org/features/owain-yeomans-veggie-testimonials/.

Food, Support, Animals

“He unveils Himself as the One He is by veiling Himself in a form which He Himself is not. He uses this form distinct from Himself, He uses its work and sign, in order to be objective in, with and under this form, and therefore to give Himself to us to be known. Revelation means the giving of signs. We can say quite simply that revelation means sacrament, i. e., the self-witness of God, the representation of His truth, and therefore of the truth in which He knows Himself, in the form of creaturely objectivity and therefore in a form which is adapted to our creaturely knowledge.”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

God, Truth, Knowledge

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon”, p. 109.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"

Men, Knowledge, Sense, Time

“…the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Light, Night

“The nature of this trade, certainly not the most honourable in the world, affords room for much investigation and remark in a moral or humane point of view: in a political or commercial light it is perhaps less conspicuously an object of attention. It consists chiefly of commodities that are considered as holding a first rate place in the animal and the mineral world, for which in return the Africans receive the most rascally articles that the ingenuity of Europeans has found means to produce. In return to our fellow creatures, for gold, and for ivory, we exchange the basest of those articles that are suited to the taste or the fancy of a despicable set of barbarians. Whether the spirituous liquirs or the fire-arms that are sent there are most calculated for the destruction of the purchasers, might become a question not very easy to determine. The noxious quality of the one is at least equalled by the danger of attending the use of the other. There does not seem to be that regard to honour in this trade, which ought to make part of the nice character of the English merchant, unimpeachable, unimpeached, upon the 'Change of London or of Amsterdam. It seems as if we kept our honour for ourselves, and that with those barbarians (who are more our inferiors in address and cunning, than perhaps in any thing else) no honour, humanity, or equity, were at all necessary.”

William Playfair (1758–1824) British mathematician, engineer and political economist

Observations on the Trade to Africa, Chart XVI, page 65.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

World, Question, Nature, Light

“Now let's make this an evening
Lovers for a night, lovers for tonight.
Stay here with me, love, tonight.
Just for an evening
When we make
Our passion pictures.
You and me twist up,
Secret creatures.
And we'll stay here.
Tomorrow go back to being friends.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Say Goodbye
Crash (1996)

Love, Secret, Lovers, Passion

“We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

Death, Birth, Thinking, Water

“… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Time, Indifference

“A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Way, Intelligence, Understanding, Thinking

“All around the world people are saying that we want to struggle to continue as global communities, to create a world free of xenophonbia and racism, a world from which poverty has been expunged, and the availability of food is not subject to the demands of capitalist profit. I would say a world where a corporation like Monsanto would be deemed criminal. Where homophobia and transphobia can truly be called historical relics along with the punishment of incarceration and institutions of confinement for disabled people; and where everyone learns how to respect the environment and all of the creatures, human and non-human alike, with whom we cohabit our worlds.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People, World, Food, Communication

“I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Chuckles) Did I say that? I guess I did.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

Quote from her 2009 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans

Life, Hope, Intelligence, Universe

“Wolves had got under my skin and my mind was in turmoil. I felt nothing but contempt for my fellow man and nothing but admiration for these creatures that had admitted me into their world. Theirs was the world I wanted to stay in. It was safer than mine, more disciplined, and I had a greater sense of belonging.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

World, Sense

“There can be no purity whilst the flesh of creatures is partaken of and inhumanity towards the creatures practised.”

John Todd Ferrier (1855–1943) Christian vegetarian

The Inner Meaning of the Food Reform Movement (1934), p. 10; as quoted in The Vegetarian Movement in England, 1847– 1981 by Julia Twigg (University of London, 1981), ch. 7 http://www.ivu.org/history/thesis/cross.html.

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Sex, Exercises, Nature, Learning

“The church itself has got to go outside of its own borders and carry the gospel to ev'ry creature, or it is no church of Christ; and any mutual improvement club which thinks that by reading its Shakspearo, or by acting its pretty tableaux, or by having. this or that little reading from Spenser and from Chaucer, it is going to lift itself up into any higher order of culture or life, is wholly mistaken, unless as an essential part of its duty, it goes out into the world, finds those that are falling down, and lifts them up to the majesty of freemen, who are sons of God.”

Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) American author and Unitarian clergyman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 150.

Life, God, World, Thinking

Quotes about creature page 8

Quotes about creature
page 8