β
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
β
β
Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx)
β
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
β
Happiness is a warm puppy.
β
β
Charles M. Schulz
β
The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
β
β
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
β
Dogs never bite me. Just humans.
β
β
Marilyn Monroe
β
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
β
β
John Muir
β
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
β
β
George Bernard Shaw
β
I was not a pet, not a doll, not an animal.
I was a survivor, and I was strong.
I would not be weak, or helpless again
I would not, could not be broken. Tamed.
β
β
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
β
Man is the cruelest animal.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
β
β
Mahatma Gandhi
β
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
β
β
Fyodor Dostoevsky
β
Why can't you place a blessing like that on us?" I asked.
"It only works on wild animals."
"So it would only affect Percy," Annabeth reasoned.
"Hey!" I protested.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
β
Meowβ means βwoofβ in cat.
β
β
George Carlin
β
Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.
β
β
A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh (Winnie-the-Pooh, #1))
β
All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
β
β
John Steinbeck
β
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
β
β
Winston S. Churchill
β
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
Like a wild animal, the truth is too powerful to remain caged.
β
β
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
β
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
β
β
Mark Twain
β
A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
β
β
Josh Billings
β
We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination.
β
β
George Moore
β
I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.
β
β
Ellen DeGeneres
β
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting β
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
β
β
Mary Oliver
β
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
β
β
Colette Gauthier-Villars
β
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.
β
β
Pseudonymous Bosch (The Name of This Book Is Secret (Secret, #1))
β
Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
β
Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.
β
β
John Green (Paper Towns)
β
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
β
β
Anatole France
β
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (Fear & Loathing Letters, #1))
β
You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.
β
β
Paul McCartney
β
If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
β
β
Groucho Marx
β
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
β
β
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
β
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
β
β
Leo Tolstoy
β
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
β
β
Immanuel Kant
β
All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed.
For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.
β
β
Charles M. Schulz
β
The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
I felt like an animal, and animals donβt know sin, do they?
β
β
Jess C. Scott (Wicked Lovely)
β
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
β
β
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
β
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
β
β
Alice Walker
β
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
β
β
Arthur Schopenhauer (The Basis of Morality (Dover Philosophical Classics))
β
Four legs good, two legs bad.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
β
β
Arthur Schopenhauer (The Basis of Morality (Dover Philosophical Classics))
β
Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo.
β
β
A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh (Winnie-the-Pooh, #1))
β
If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
β
β
James Herriot (All Creatures Great and Small (All Creatures Great and Small, #1-2))
β
He was slumped over, blood trickling from the side of his mouth. I shook his furry hip, thinking, No! Even if you are half barnyard animal, you're my best friend and I don't want you to die!
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
β
The only good human being is a dead one.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
β
β
Leonardo da Vinci
β
This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
β
β
Walt Whitman
β
Ten Things You Shouldn't Say on a Date.
1. You're wearing that?
2. Something smells funny.
3. Where's the Tylenol?
4. And to think, I first wanted to date your brother.
5. I have a confession to makeβ¦
6. My dad has a suit just like that.
7. That man is hot. Look at him.
8. My ex, may he rot in hell foreverβ¦
9. You're going to order that? Seriously?
10. You're how old?
β
β
Gena Showalter (Animal Instincts)
β
Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them.
β
β
Elvis Presley
β
If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.
β
β
Ellen DeGeneres (My Point... And I Do Have One)
β
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.
β
β
Henry David Thoreau
β
Stories don't always have happy endings."
This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.
β
β
Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls)
β
And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks
β
You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.
β
β
Robert Louis Stevenson
β
If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.
β
β
Woodrow Wilson
β
When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.
β
β
Masashi Kishimoto
β
Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.
β
β
Dean Koontz (False Memory)
β
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
I had weird dreams full of barnyard animals. Most of them wanted to kill me. The rest wanted food.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
β
Oh, I donβt mean youβre handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - theyβre beautiful. Theyβre wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Women)
β
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
β
β
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
β
You know, sometimes the world seems like a pretty mean place.'
'That's why animals are so soft and huggy.
β
β
Bill Watterson (Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" (Calvin and Hobbes, #6))
β
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.
β
β
Richard Adams (Watership Down)
β
Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.
It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.
β
β
John Grogan (Marley and Me: Life and Love With the Worldβs Worst Dog)
β
While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
β
As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
β
β
Pythagoras
β
Katniss," Gale says softly.
I recognize that voice. It's the same one he uses to approach wounded animals before he delivers a deathblow. I Instinctively raise my hand to block his words but he catches it and holds on tightly.
Don't," I whisper.
But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me.
Katniss, There is no District Twelve.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
β
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
β
β
Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)
β
How long did you resist?β asks Uriel. βDid you push her away? Did you tell her she meant no more to you than any other animal? Oh, Raffe, did she die thinking you didn't care about her? How tragic. That must just tear you to pieces.β
Raffe looks up with murder in his eyes. βDon't. Talk. About. Her.
β
β
Susan Ee (Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1))
β
He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated)
β
I read somewhere, one, that crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.
I think we cry to release the animal parts of us without losing our humanity. Because inside of me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom, toward Tobias, and, above all, towards life. And as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.
β
β
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
β
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
β
β
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
β
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
β
β
Cormac McCarthy (The Road)
β
You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you've never told anybody else.'
I thought for a moment. 'Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.'
It took Isabel only a second to process this. 'No, they don't.'
'I know that's why I've never told anybody that before.
β
β
Maggie Stiefvater (Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #2))
β
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldnβt fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
β
β
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
β
A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
β
β
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhikerβs Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
β
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
β
β
Aristotle (Politics)
β
When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adamβs ribs under Ronanβs hands and Adamβs mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on his lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for far longer.
β
β
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
β
Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
1 He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
2 He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
3 He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
4 He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
5 He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
β
β
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
β
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
β
β
Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species)
β
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-containβd, I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
β
β
Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition)
β
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
β
β
Stephen Hawking
β
Save yourselves!β Percy warned. βIt is too late for us!β
Then he gasped and pointed to the spot where Frank was hiding. βOh, no! Frank is turning into a crazy dolphin!β
Nothing happened.
βI said,β Percy repeated, βFrank is turning into a crazy dolphin!β
Frank stumbled out of nowhere, making a big show of grabbing his throat. βOh, no,β he said, like he was reading from a teleprompter. βI am turning into a crazy dolphin.β
He began to change, his nose elongating into a snout, his skin becoming sleek and gray. He fell to the deck as a dolphin, his tail thumping against the boards.
The pirate crew disbanded in terror.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
β
We can't..." he told me.
"I know," I agreed.
Then his mouth was on mine again, and this time, I knew there would be no turning back. There were no walls this time. Our bodies wrapped together as he tried to get my coat off, then his shirt, then my shirt. ... It really was a lot like when we'd fought out on the quad earlier-that same passion and heat. I think at the end of the day, the instincts that power fighting and sex aren't so different. They all come from an animal side of us.
Yet, as more and more clothes came off, it went beyond just animal passion. It was sweet and wonderful at the same time. When I looked into his eyes, I could see without a doubt that he loved me more than anyone else in the world, that I was his salvation, the same way that he was mine. I'd never expected my first time to be in a cabin in the woods, but I realized the place didn't matter. The person did. With someone you loved, you could be anywhere, and it would be incredible. Being in the most luxurious bed in the world wouldn't matter if you were with someone you didn't love.
β
β
Richelle Mead (Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy, #3))
β
Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion - which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea - you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some blood-thirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself.
β
β
Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)
β
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology) (ABRIDGED))
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Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.
Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
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Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)
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For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasΓ©: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again.
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
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You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white. I donβt need a god. I have you and your beautiful mouth, your hands holding onto me, the nails leaving unfelt wounds, your hot breath on my neck. The taste of your saliva. The darkness is ours. The nights belong to us. Everything we do is secret. Nothing we do will ever be understood; we will be feared and kept well away from. It will be the stuff of legend, endless discussion and limitless inspiration for the brave of heart. Itβs you and me in this room, on this floor. Beyond life, beyond morality. We are gleaming animals painted in moonlit sweat glow. Our eyes turn to jewels and everything we do is an example of spontaneous perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch. The time I annihilated while I waited like a man doing a life sentence. Now youβre here and everything we touch explodes, bursts into bloom or burns to ash. History atomizes and negates itself with our every shared breath. I need you like life needs life. I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.
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Henry Rollins
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Haven't I? - he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ...He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her ...Since the first time I saw you ...Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ...Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed ...You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved - as if you were a man? ...Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life - the only person I respected - the best business man I know - my ally - my partner in a desperate battle ...The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met ...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you cant conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!
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Ayn Rand
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Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer β Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus β Tragedies
4. Sophocles β Tragedies
5. Herodotus β Histories
6. Euripides β Tragedies
7. Thucydides β History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates β Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes β Comedies
10. Plato β Dialogues
11. Aristotle β Works
12. Epicurus β Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid β Elements
14. Archimedes β Works
15. Apollonius of Perga β Conic Sections
16. Cicero β Works
17. Lucretius β On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil β Works
19. Horace β Works
20. Livy β History of Rome
21. Ovid β Works
22. Plutarch β Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus β Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa β Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus β Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy β Almagest
27. Lucian β Works
28. Marcus Aurelius β Meditations
29. Galen β On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus β The Enneads
32. St. Augustine β On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt NjΓ‘l
36. St. Thomas Aquinas β Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri β The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer β Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci β Notebooks
40. NiccolΓ² Machiavelli β The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus β The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus β On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More β Utopia
44. Martin Luther β Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. FranΓ§ois Rabelais β Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin β Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne β Essays
48. William Gilbert β On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes β Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser β Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon β Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare β Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei β Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler β Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey β On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes β Leviathan
57. RenΓ© Descartes β Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton β Works
59. MoliΓ¨re β Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal β The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens β Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza β Ethics
63. John Locke β Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine β Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton β Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz β Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe β Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift β A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve β The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley β Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope β Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu β Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire β Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding β Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson β The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
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Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)