Animal Kingdom Quotes

“In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed. But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power of violence at once hidden and palpable… has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.

From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... So it is accomplished... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“If we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well--but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife--the tragedy begins. We can't return to nature, since we can't change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity [...] There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that [...] is always but a vain and floating appearance.”
― Joseph Conrad

“Work on making yourself a complete being. Though you were born with the physical traits of one sex, you possess the characteristics of both - including those of plants and animals. You were created as a nearly complete universal being, but with flaws. True perfection can only be achieved when one recognizes that they need to combine their oneness with others and nature. Only then is one considered complete.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We can always be human
Meeting each day a wise new man
But the Animal Kingdom to which we belong
Animals we are; this truth can’t be wrong.”
― Munia Khan, Beyond The Vernal Mind

“It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“She is still forming her conclusions but, above all, is convinced that their actions are borne of instinct: fixed patterns that take them to their source of food, to their safe havens, to their mates, and, ultimately, to their death, since their predators learn these patterns as surely as if they, too, had read Maud’s book.”
― Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club

“Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Out there in the wild, the lion is a VIP, and the rest are his entourage.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“I must say that I was very glad when Juanita got better, not only because I did not want to lose her, but also because it is very exhausting to sleep with a playful peccary in your bed.”
― Gerald Durrell, Island Zoo

“I have long found bats to be one of the more fascinating creatures our animal kingdom has to offer. From the dog-sized Malaysian flying foxes down to the adorable and puffy Honduran white bats, they intrigue me to no end.”
― Aesop Rock