Animals suffer both emotionally and physically, but they don't suffer metaphysically. That is, they don't suffer about suffering, don't get thrown into spiritual confusion by it, or fall out of connection with the divine because of it.
Because we tend to equate intelligence with language--particularly the ability to use language to think and communicate abstractions--it is natural to conclude that animals are, on the whole, a lot less intelligent than we are.
I believe the happiness we feel in relation to animals is immensely significant. I believe it is absolutely central to our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.
The fewer plants and animals we are able to recognize as individuals—recognize well enough to name—the more alienated we have come to feel from ourselves, the Earth and God, the Source.
Humans do have authority over creation—but it is a delegated authority to care for animals as God would and not to destroy them. All life still belongs to the Creator of life, as it did the in the beginning.
What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.
My wife allowed me to build an animation studio in our house, and I'm always in there. The great thing is that my wife will come down and do the voices for me, and I'll animate it. But then if we're upstairs, and she wants to watch something like 'Fo...
I live in New York, and the only live animals you see are cockroaches, rats and pigeons, which I admire immensely. When I see an animal that thrives in the garbage, I feel relief; in our urban environment, other animals are dying out.
Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the ...
Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy abo...
A mule driver is not aware of the stink of his animals.
Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.
If you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it.
I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
You know, sometimes the world seems like a pretty mean place.' 'That's why animals are so soft and huggy.
Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world.
It's awesome, because in live-action, most of my comedies have been rated R, so I'm trying to make adults laugh. While animation is a completely different world where you're trying to make children laugh. So that difference is a blast to do.
It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.
If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
I looked about me once again, and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are, and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from whence the horses came, and vanished.
