Animals and Nature

THERE ARE ONLY TEN MINUTES IN THE LIFE OF A PEAR WHEN IT IS PERFECT TO EAT.

No animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.

A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up.

I only know how true it is: that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.

The imagination is man’s power over nature.

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

One is born into a herd of buffaloes and must be glad if one is not trampled underfoot before one’s time.

It is better for people to be like the beasts… They should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it.

I believe that all creatures who can have young ones together are very much the same.

The psychological roots of war are, in my opinion, biologically rooted in the aggressive nature of the male creature… Some animals—the bull and the rooster—surpass us in this regard.

O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird,

One impulse from a vernal wood

A violet by a mossy stone

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew … Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

’Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.

Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,