Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring, it was peace.
The bee isn't really that busy, it just can't buzz any slower.
Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
Now I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance: a sharp, vindictive glance.
Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
The dog has seldom been successful in pulling Man up to its level of sagacity, but Man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.
"They were apes only yesterday. Give them time."
"Once an ape, always an ape."...
"No, it will be different... Come back here in an age or so and you shall see..."
Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor who just wanted to see what it was like in there.