Creatures Quotes - Page 19

• The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

  Robert Ardrey

  Stars, Science, Men

  "African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man". Book by Robert Ardrey, 1961.

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• Every change in human attitude must come through internal understanding and acceptance. Man is the only known creature who can reshape and remould himself by altering his attitude.

  John C. Maxwell

  Attitude, Acceptance, Men

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• . . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Love, Flower, Animal

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1963). “Collected Stories”

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• In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.

  W. S. Merwin

  Rain, Garden, Rivers

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• When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.

  Marv Levy

  Morning, Fun, Father

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• So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on its leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: ... that our Earth has fashioned itself, from its chaos of substances and powers, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of preparatory revolutions, till at last the crown of its creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear.

  Johann Gottfried Herder

  Book, Science, Men

  Johann Gottfried Herder (1800). “Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man”, p.259

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• A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.

  C. S. Lewis

  Atheist, Flower, Atheism

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument - their intellect - which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.

  Galen Strawson

  Atheist, Believe, Taken

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• The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Bible, Book, Biblical

  The Watchtower magazine, May 15, 1992.

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• They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted.

  Terry Pratchett

  Jobs, Years, Toxins

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• Svengal lay groaning on the turf. His thighs were sheer agony. His buttocks ached. His calf muscles were on fire. Now, afterhe had tumbled off the small pony he was riding and thudded heavily to the turf on the point of his shoulder, the shoulder would hurt too. He concentrated on trying to find one part of his body that wasn't a giant source of pain and failed miserably. He opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the face of the elderly pony that he had been riding peered down at him. Now what made you do a strange thing like that? The creature seemed to be asking.

  John Flanagan

  Hurt, Pain, Eye

  John Flanagan (2011). “Erak's Ransom (Ranger's Apprentice Book 7)”, p.83, Random House

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• It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Responsibility, Men, Omnipotence

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• We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to help people understand that animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves...

  Cesar Chavez

  Inspiring, Animal, People

  Cesar Chavez's acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award from "In Defense of Animals", 1992.

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• the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Men, Consistency, Doubt

  D H Lawrence, Daniel Defoe (2012). “Stop What You’re Doing and Read…Banned Books: Lady Chatterley's Lover & Moll Flanders”, p.267, Random House

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• The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.

  Josephine Tey

  Angel, Men, Thinking

  Josephine Tey (2012). “The Franchise Affair”, p.251, Simon and Schuster

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• And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Yellow, What If, Life Is

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• As he left to answer the call, she heard him exclaiming in wonderment on the rise. "Rocks, Nash. Is that a river mare out there? Do you see her? Have you ever laid eyes on a more gorgeous creature?

  Kristin Cashore

  Eye, Rocks, Rivers

  Kristin Cashore (2009). “Fire”, p.264, Penguin

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• If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Heart, Men, Color

  Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.145, Pan Macmillan

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• You’ve got to be kidding me. I thought you were the most powerful of beings. Even the gods fear you. (Stryker) We all have predators. The entire universe exists in a system of checks and balances. I just met my zero balance. (War) Are you honestly telling me that the most powerful creature on this planet is a pathetic Cajun guttersnipe who offed himself because one of my men killed his mommy? (Stryker)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Zero, Powerful, War

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• Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure..... Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?

  Herman Melville

  Sea, Land, Water

  Herman Melville (2012). “Moby Dick (Illustrated & Annotated Edition)”, p.301, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak; Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit, Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak, The folded meaning of your words' deceit.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Thinking, Errors

  BookCaps, William Shakespeare (2011). “The Comedy of Errors In Plain and Simple English: BookCaps Study Guide”, p.72, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.

  Voltaire

  Inspirational, Time, Philosophical

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• Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Stars, Pain, Profound

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.553, Modern Library

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• I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Air, Shining

  "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". Book by Annie Dillard, 1974.

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• Well, have you ever thought of bathing?' I asked, turning away. 'No one wants to hire a wizard who smells worse than their outhouse. And who knows what creatures are living in that hair?

  Alexandra Bracken

  Hair, Smell, Wizards

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