On Nature and Animals

Henry Beston, 1888-1968
The Outermost House
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals ... We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. [TOP]

The Holy Bible
Revelation 7:3
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees. [TOP]

Glenda Jackson, 1936-
Newspaper interview
No one really needs a mink coat in this world ... except minks. [TOP]

Stevie Smith, 1902-
In his fur the animal rode, and in his fur he strove,
And oh, it filled my heart my heart
it filled my heart with love. [TOP]

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882
The Descent of Man
There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties ... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. [TOP]

John G. Neihardt, 1881-1973
Black Elk Speaks
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?
Hear me, four quarters of the world ... a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is!
...all over the earth, the faces of living things are all alike. [TOP]

Theodore Roethke, 1908-1963
Slug
I’m sure I’ve been a toad, one time or another.
With bats, weasels, worms ... I rejoice in the kinship.
Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin. [TOP]

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-
Newsweek interview, 10/16/78
I feel that animals are as bewildered as we are except that they have no words for it. I would say that all life is asking: “What am I doing here?” [TOP]

Stevie Smith, 1902-
It Filled My Heart With Love
In his fur the animal rode
and in his fur he strove,
And oh, it filled my heart my heart
it filled my heart with love. [TOP]

Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894
To What Purpose This Waste?
And other eyes than ours
Were made to look on flowers,
Eyes of small birds and insects small:
The deep sun-blushing rose
Round which the prickles close
Opens her bosom to them all.
The tiniest living thing
That soars on feathered wing,
Or crawls among the long grass out of sight
Has just as good a right
To its appointed portion of delight
As any King. [TOP]

Bret Harte, 1836-1902
The Reader’s Digest
A bird in the hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing. [TOP]

Henry S. Salt, 1851-1939
The Story of My Cousins
Of all death-bed sayings perhaps the wisest was Thoreau’s: “One world at a time.” When we have grasped the great central fact about animals, that they are in the full sense our fellow beings, all else will follow for them; and we shall know, and act upon the knowledge, that in the words of Howard Moore, “They are not conveniences but cousins.” [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Familiar Letters
I do not consider the other animals brutes in the common sense. I am attracted toward them undoubtedly because I never heard any nonsense from them. I have not convicted them of folly or vanity or pomposity or stupidity in dealing with me. Their vices, at any rate, do not interfere with me. [TOP]

Journal
I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that is all. [TOP]

Miv Shaaf
Does a bird occasionally perch on a branch—or a beaver sit on top of the lodge it has built with its own paws—and stop and think about things?
...how poor I feel trying to patch together, with only a broken basket of words, a rough delineation of a feeling a lioness puts across with a switch of her tail. [TOP]

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892
Song of Myself
I think I could turn and live with animals,
They are so placid and self-contain’d.
I stand and look at them long and long.
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. [TOP]

Barry Lopez
Of Wolves and Men
Before a wolf was brought into their classroom, a group of grade school children were asked to draw pictures of wolves. The wolves in the picture all had enormous fangs. The wolf was brought in, and the person with him began speaking about wolves. The children were awed by the animal. When the wolf left, the teacher asked the children to do another drawing. The new drawings had no large fangs. They all had enormous feet. [TOP]

Brian Riley
Free the animal:
veritas anima
liberatus lucidus
deus divinitas
hominem animale
assimilate similarities
contemplate the parity
we will always be one animal
I am he as he is she
she is you and you are me
and we were born to free
free the animal
come from your cage
all earth a hell
all heaven in a rage
we eat, sleep, laugh and weep
we live a life that matters
free the animal [TOP]

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
On the Sufferings of the World
There is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with us—I mean, their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. [TOP]

President Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me. [TOP]

Roger Rosenblatt
About trees
Life without them is impossible; a day without seeing one unimaginable. [TOP]

Chief Sealth (Seattle), c. 1786-1866
Chief Seattle’s Testimony, an 1854 oration, attributed
We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle; these are our brothers. [TOP]

The Koran, 6th and 7th century
There is no beast on earth, nor fowl that flieth, but the same are a people like unto you, and to God they shall return. [TOP]

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
Walden
I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. [TOP]

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880
The greatest achievement in art is not to stir lust or fury, but to do as nature herself does, and set men’s minds to dreaming. [TOP]

Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity. [TOP]

Lord George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824
Don Juan
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
there is a rapture by the lonely shore;
there is society, where none intrudes;
by the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less,
but nature more. [TOP]

Ray Bradbury
Preface to Sealsong by Brian Davies
Animals are not nephews or cousins; somewhere far back down the line, our hearts and blood moved much the same. Some old racial memory lost in me remembers this. It is hard for me to look and not read the bright signals. I hear that old heartbeat from a million-plus years ago. Their family, my family, our family, are gazing at one another. I cannot refuse the stare that asks great questions that must be answered. I cannot turn away. [TOP]

William Blake, 1757-1827
Auguries of Innocence
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. [TOP]

Joseph Wood Krutch, 1893-1970
The Modern Temper
Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature. [TOP]

David Grayson, 1870-1946
Adventures in Contentment
Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail, every one, until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil. [TOP]

William Hazlitt, 1778-1830
Sketches and Essays
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. [TOP]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950
Renascence
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart! [TOP]

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850
Lines Composed from a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her. [TOP]

Alighieri Dante, 1265-1321
On World Government
Nature is the art of God. [TOP]

Martin Buber, 1878-1965
I and Thou
An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language. [TOP]

George Eliot, 1819-1880
Scenes of Clerical Life
Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. [TOP]

D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930
Self Pity
I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead
From a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself. [TOP]

Voltaire, 1694-1778
Philosophical Dictionary
How pitiful, and what poverty of mind, to have said that the animals are machines deprived of understanding and feeling... [TOP]

J. Todd Ferrier, 1855-1943
On Behalf of the Creatures
It is difficult to understand how anyone who has studied animals could come to the conclusion that they do not feel; and more difficult to understand how any man who professes to have been moved by the compassion of God could believe and teach that we need not consider the feelings of the other species, as they are only things—“mere chattels.” Yet men do believe such things, and teach them. And when we realize how much the doctrine is held in “high places,” it is not to be wondered that cruelty abounds, and our fellow creatures are made to pass through the fire of unspeakable suffering as sacrifices to the Moloch of human lust and scientific insanity. [TOP]

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